Home Is In Your Skin
by greenwool
Summary: Tragedy has been chasing teenage runaway Katniss Everdeen longer than she can remember. In a desperate attempt to escape it once and for all, she lands herself in Estes Park, Colorado, where she meets Peeta Mellark, a boy who unknowingly can't stop saving her from herself.
1. The Day The Music Died

**Trigger Warning: Death of a major character, sexual abuse, self harm/mutilation, opiate addiction, disordered eating, depression.**

* * *

_**Home is in Your Skin**_

"_Real or not real, I am on fire."_

* * *

_**i.**_

I'm not fully aware of what I'm doing until I hit seventy-five miles an hour, putting as much distance between myself and Boulder as fast as I possibly can. Trees are flying by on either side of the two-lane highway in a watercolor blur of ashy browns and blacks but all I focus on is the endless road ahead of me, the roar of the wind against my windshield, and the grit of my tires against the tar vibrating my car's frame.

I don't want to call it running away, even though that's what it technically is. I am just 'choosing me', as Prim would have said, and I know she would be glad that I am finally moving forward, even if I'm not really moving on. I guess Prim would be glad of a lot of things if she was still here.

But she's not, so Prim's not glad at all. She's just dead.

* * *

Estes Park isn't a decision, its just where I end up - miles from Boulder and the burnt out shell of Building #12 and the adoption center where Gale and I met.

That's probably a huge part of the attractionto the place.

The air is different though too - so clean and cold that it stings in your throat and lungs, and it's so quiet that I can pretend I spent my whole life running through forests instead of hiding in dusty closets, and no one and nothing can remind me that it isn't true.

I live in my car, and it's my best living situation yet, bar the lack of running water. Every night I pull onto the shoulder of a different road, tear open a 99-cent bag of sunflower seeds and recline my chair as far back as it will go. Its the happiest I've been in years, all alone under the black velvet sky, the winking gaze of white stars overhead and my feet frozen to numbness in my wool socks. Miserably cold and slowly starving is still better than a foster home.

I lose myself in that black sky.

Breathing, in and out, over and over. Not thinking. Just _being_.

Living on autopilot.

It takes me a week of quiet and isolation for it to hit. How the events of the past few years would always be with me. How I would never escape them, no matter how fast or how far I run. There's a hurricane in my mind and I am in the eye staring into the chaos all around me, wondering if my umbrella will be enough when I disappear in the wind and the rain.

And that's when I know.

I am not waiting to be swallowed by the storm. I already have been, and all that remains of me is the absence another girl left behind. Like a bleach stain, or the split knee on a pair of pants. I am a person-shaped nothing.

I touch the scars on my back and arms gently, curiously, as though I'd never seen them before. And then I'm screaming and I can't stop, scratching them into gaping bloody trails and yelling until there's nothing left in me. Then, raw and hungry and bleeding, I tuck into a ball and _cry_.

I cry for Gale. We only ever had each other, and now we don't even have that. I cry for Prim, who was too fucking good for this world and all the shit in it. I cry for me, selfish enough to try and leave both of them behind in my past, but not selfish enough to just off myself and _really_ leave it all behind. I cry because I am a coward and I must deserve all of this because what else makes sense?

The storm passes. The morning dawns, clear and blue. I put my car into gear and drive.

In the weeks that follow, I try to put myself back together.

I bathe in the near frozen streams on warmer days and hope to God no one catches me out here - naked, shivering and pink, covered in puckering scars. I pick up some line-cook work and eat some real food, rent wilderness survival books from the library and read them curled up on my backseat with the cleanest duvet I can find at Goodwill. Even though it smells like mold, I don't mind it so much. Its warm and heavy and for a split second in the mornings I can almost pretend I'm not all alone out here. I pretend someone's arms are wrapped around me. Solid. Warm. Safe.

And then one night, with my windows fogged up like shower doors and my heater choking on its last breath, _'__American Pie'_comes on the radio and I fall over the console to turn the volume up as loud as it will go. My throat is so dry I am sure it's completely useless, but to my surprise my mouth opens like it's not even mine anymore and I sing and sing and I haven't forgotten a single word of that song -_not one single word_. It's like me and Dad are sitting in this shitty car together, _like he's right here next to me_, belting out our favorite song on the side of a mountain in the middle of March.

It's a whole eight minutes long - that's a long time to sing like I'm doing, and I haven't tried to in years. It feels like I am running. My heart is galloping and I can't keep my throat from tightening or my eyes from burning but I don't stop because it isn't Don Maclean coming from my radio, it's Dad and he's singing to me about the world ending in silence and fire, and I am answering him, telling him that it did, telling him that I've been voiceless this whole time because the world really did end and by some sick twist of fate I'm still fucking here.

And I really wish I wasn't.

Then suddenly there's a loud rap on my window, and I am so startled I just swing the car door wide open instead of rolling down the foggy window and the last tinkling notes of the song blast embarrassingly loud into the silent night air.

In the snow in front of me is a woman with the most terrifying scowl I've ever seen. She couldn't have been a hair over five foot and is maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet. She tells me I'm brainless. Then she offers me a job.

* * *

Her name is Johanna Mason, and she owns a few cabins up on one of the mountains that she rents out to tourists and weirdos. I say weirdos because her cabins weren't structures in the traditional sense - they're what look like wooden domes but are really something called yurts. They're kind of dreamy; magical in a real way, not in a Disneyland kind of way.

They're a little weird. So is she.

It's perfect.

I really like Johanna. She built this place from the ground up on all her own, with nothing but a few power tools and some buckets of paint. She painted all the yurts different colors, so they're like rainbow polka dots in the pristine snow, and with the lights on and smoke trailing out of the chimneys, they're damn near fantastical. Like a real-life fairytale.

Before she did all this though, she was a journalist for the New York Times stationed in Kabul. A small group of militants kidnapped her and held her hostage, but when nobody came to rescue her -_'We don't negotiate with turr-er-ists', _she mocks coldly - they let her go. In the middle of the Hindu Kush mountains.

"And that's where the _real_ story starts," she assures me. I think she thinks that I'll ask her to go on. It would be the friendly thing to do, after all. But I don't. I don't say anything.

I don't care to know anything else about her, including how she made it back home, because I don't want her to ask _me_ any personal questions and because I can already see that Johanna Mason is just like me. We survived something we know we shouldn't have and we're still trying to figure out if there is, in fact, a way to _live_ after near-death, or if you're always trapped between the two.

As far as I'm concerned, the jury's still out.

Despite the down economy, Johanna's business is doing miraculously well, even in the winter. She needs someone who can do minor repairs, give directions to tourists, and in the spring, lead tours through Estes Park's numerous hiking trails. I take the job because really, what else am I doing?

_And where else would I go?_

She gives me a yurt to live in right next to hers and I immediately regret being so judgmental of these little houses. It's like living in a mushroom cap. They're surprisingly spacious and cozy on the inside, with a wood stove that doubles as a fire place in the dead center, and furniture all around. Mine just has a mattress and a stove, but Johanna's has all manner of odds and ends from her days as a reporter, including a small collection of decorative axes from all over the world. Eventually, I might add some personal things to mine too, but for right now, empty and small is all I want.

* * *

Winter melts into spring, and nobody comes looking for me, not even Gale. I'm not sure they'd ever find me here, but I'd hear from someone if out-of-towners were asking about me. We don't have TVs and we're so high in the mountains that we don't even get radio reception. Johanna doesn't know I'm technically a missing person, but I think she suspects something. I have to be careful.

I don't tell her anything. Not about the public housing I grew up in. Not the food stamps. Not the fire. Not the foster homes. And especially not about my family or Gale. She never asks either. Johanna is as sharp as those axes that hang on her walls, but I don't think she likes very many people to know it.

In April we're booked to capacity and even though I don't like other people very much, I love talking to our guests. They come from all over the United States and beyond - families, business men, burn-outs, hikers, Mormons and even a guy Johanna and I suspect is part of a drug cartel. I take them on hikes, set up barbecues and bonfires, but mostly, I listen to their stories.

I pretend I don't live in my skin. I pretend the scars on my back and arms washed away in those freezing rivers when I scrubbed myself raw, naked and blue-lipped in the snowy forest. I uneat those sunflower seeds. Reverse my car back to Boulder. Wrap myself in Gale's arms. Tuck myself into his bed.

I go back to the start to find where things went so wrong and spend my nights solving the puzzle of how to get three people out of a burning building alive.

I decide I don't need anything in my little house. Just me and my stove and my bed - and other people's lives dancing on the walls of my closed eyes like shadows. Like dreams.

* * *

It's May when I meet Peeta Mellark, and I've spent a month wrapped in a warm blanket of escapism. But first, here's the truth: I don't trust men. I _dread_ them.

They're only ever greedy eyes and too many hands.

I dread sex and the inevitable horror I will see on my partner's face when he discovers what I look like when I'm down to just my skin, with my back and arms a mottled mess of tight, shiny scars. It was bad this winter when I couldn't afford the lotion to rub on them. They cracked and bled and scarred back over, and now there's even more of them to hate.

Only Gale knows what I look like, even though he's never really seen all of it. I made him fuck me with my shirt on and the lights off. He was so patient with what a neurotic mess I was and all I ever did was tell him that I didn't trust him enough. I never undressed in front of him, even though he begged and pleaded with me.

He told me he thought I was beautiful. Beautiful no matter load of good all that did him in the end. It helps that we met as teenagers in the system and had been inseparable ever since, and that we had more history than just our few awkward fucks in semi-darkness. I think he thought eventually I would get over it.

I didn't though, and the 'why' of that lies in the second half of the truth: I hid from him because I never wanted to see _that_ look on his face.

I've only ever seen it once. On a different man. Before Gale.

It was through a cloudy plastic curtain as the plunking of water against porcelain roared in my ears and I thought "_wrong wrong wrong_" over and over and so hard that the room was spinning in circles like I was a carousel and the man on the other side of the curtain was greedy for his turn. Tight muscles around the nostrils tugging at the top lip, narrowed eyes, head leaning back and away- it was disgust. I dread someone looking at me like he did.

So I never let Gale see me, and he still wanted to marry me. I couldn't tell him that I didn't want a husband. Didn't want another family that could burn away to ash. I never deserved Gale Hawthorne and now that I don't have him, I probably won't ever have anyone again.

But that's ok. Empty and alone suits me.

* * *

So, it's April when I meet Peeta.

It's near dusk, the warmest it's been so far this spring, and the sky is a sugary pink-orange gradient that turns the jagged peaks of the mountains a deep, shadowy black. Johanna and I need groceries and we've just parked in the parking lot of a run-down Safeway and are making our way inside when I hear a wolf whistle and my insides completely freeze. Johanna's eyes narrow and she turns murderously towards the beat-up white pick-up we had just walked past. I'm surprised when I see that it's not a man behind the wheel of the car, but a young girl with a wide, flat nose and a rambunctious halo of dark curls. She's cute - willowy, with a round face, smooth cheeks and slight gap in her front teeth.

There's something almost fairy-like about her. It must be her eyes. They're beautiful and dark, but with a hint of poorly hidden mischief.

"Rue, what in the hell are you doing?" Johanna guffaws.

The girl hides her giggle behind a hand and leans out the open window of the pick-up.

"Hey Johanna," she says with a smirk, "How you been?"

Johanna snorts.

"Busy, runt. Too busy to chatter. We're booked full up."

Then a tawny, wide-headed dog pops its head out the window too, and I can hear Johanna's iron will whistling as it sails out the window and away into the sunset.

"Hey Mutt," she practically sings, and runs a hand over his head. The dog laps vigorously at Johanna's wrist, trying to lick any part of her he can reach. Rue catches my eye and giggles, rolling her eyes skyward. I reach my hand out to pet the dog too, but before I can another hand catches mine.

"Careful," a male voice says. "Mutt isn't the friendliest to strangers."

Panicked, I twist around and come face to face with warm blue eyes, crinkled just slightly in the corners, and a bemused grin. I should yank my hand away. I should move my eyes off of his face.

I do neither.

"Oh," I say stupidly. "Sorry, I didn't even think."

He grins even wider and shrugs as he drops my hand, switching a plastic bag of groceries from hand to hand.

"Not a big deal. Mutt's just a little nervous. But I wouldn't ever forgive myself if something bad happened to you."

You're way too late for that party, I think. But I don't say anything. Just look away from him awkwardly. I know that I am frowning as much as I know that there's nothing I can do to fix it. I'm an open book. Always have been.

He clears his throat, obviously nervous that he's said or done something wrong. I want to tell him not to worry, that I'm not worth that, and anyway, it's useless because I'm not the kind of person you should want to get to know better in the first place.

"I'm Peeta, Mutt's, uh, dad? Owner sounds so weird, I hate saying it."

"Katniss."

"Katniss - like the plant. That's cool."

"Yeah, guess so."

"Do you want to meet him?" he says, gesturing at Mutt who is straining against the firm hold Rue has on his leash to lick Johanna cheek.

"Will he like me do you think?"

My eyes flicker back to him and then down at the gravel and debris on the tarmac below. Spots of green and burnt rubine glass. White chips of rock. Shining speckles of mica and sand. _What am I doing?_

I don't like animals, and they like me even less.

"Only one way to find out," he says, and I can hear the goofy smirk in his voice. "Rue, will you hand me his lead?"

The car door opens and Mutt leaps out - he's at least sixty pounds of wriggling, slobbery pitbull. Peeta nudges him towards me, leash wrapped firmly around his wrist and hand.

"Put your hands out," he says, "Palms facing up."

I do.

Mutt stills, eyeing me warily, his dark eyes flashing as he dips his head and approaches me with twitching nostrils. His body wriggles side to side as his tail swings eagerly between his back legs. He sniffs my pants at the knees, his hot breath tickling my shins.

I look up nervously at Peeta, Johanna and Rue, who are watching him with varying degrees of amusement. Peeta's grin is the widest of the three.

Suddenly, I am wilting like a plucked flower in the sunlight.

I am back in the courtroom in Boulder, swearing to tell the truth as I lay my hand on the bible so lightly that I am barely touching it and I think that maybe, if I am only brushing it, I won't feel compelled to tell the _whole_ 'truth'.

Animals have never liked me. They smell who I am. They _know_ me, probably better than any human could hope to and Mutt will too. I can't lie to this dog - he will out me to Johanna and Peeta and Rue and they will know me for what I am:

_Violent and cowardly. Distrustful and selfish._

Mutt's tail wags a little more and he licks the fabric of my pants right below my left knee. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or amazed. I suppress the breathy laugh that threatens to come out of my mouth.

"You like her huh, buddy?" Peeta says.

The dog twists around and plops his butt on my shoes, looking up at me with a wide grin, his cheeks flapping wetly as he pants and I smile nervously and rub the broad expanse of his tawny head between his ears. His fur is like velvet.

"I do too," Peeta stage whispers with a lopsided grin, as he bends over to vigorously rub Mutt's chest. Mutt's head lolls comically in response.

"Katniss is one of the good ones," Johanna says. "Mutt's a pretty good judge of character."

Peeta's baby-blues flit shyly up to mine, so he's looking me directly in the eyes when I think:

_No, he's really not._

* * *

The first time I met Gale it was under the fluorescent lighting of an adoption center's waiting room. I'll forever associate him with the dark mud I saw on his boots that day, dry and dusty against oil-slick black, trailing behind where ever he had walked. Brown dirt on sterile linoleum tiles in a room that smelled like pine sol. Our social workers were in some sort of meeting and left us to our own devices.

I was staring at him, I knew that, but there wasn't much else to look at in the claustrophobic waiting room, and Gale was _a kid my own age_ who was trapped in the same shitty predicament I was. I focused right in on his shoes, terrified of meeting the dark, piercing eyes of the boy sitting across from me.

"What?" he demands angrily, "Ain't seen Docs before?"

"Huh?"

"Docs. My boots?"

I nod my head yes quickly, afraid that this was a thing I was supposed to know about but didn't because I was poor. I desperately didn't want him to know I was poor. Or think I was stupid.

He leaned his elbows down on his knees, his hooded eyes glittering in amusement.

"Then why are you staring? See something you like?"

I blanch, leaning back in my seat as he leans forward in his and stares at me with a look on his face that I'd come to know as greedy.

"What's your name shy girl?"

"Katniss," I croak, but it's so quiet that I guess he doesn't hear me right.

"Catnip, huh? I can see that," he says, as he leans back in his chair and spreads his long legs out in front of him. I have no idea what he means.

"No," I say, clearing my throat. "I said I'm Katniss."

"Well I like Catnip better," he says. "I'm going to call you that."

"I'd prefer it if you don't," I say, but as much as I hate the nickname and as obnoxious as Gale is, I like the way he doesn't ask my permission. I like the way his hair hangs in his face. I like his boots - the Docs - and I like how tightly he laces them. I like that the sleeves are cut off his t-shirt, and I don't know what a Led Zeppelin is, or why those words are printed on his shirt, but I have a feeling I'll like that too.

Gale doesn't pretend that I can or should trust him, but the chips on our shoulders are perfectly aligned and that, at least, I can trust.

Up until the day I slip out of bed in the middle of the night, throw myself in my car and fly off to the mountains, he still calls me Catnip.

So the night I meet Peeta, after we get home and split to our separate yurts, and I lay in bed with the low fire in the wood burning stove dwindling, I whisper Gale's name into the flames and hope against hope that he can feel me thinking about him, lost and empty on a rock in the sky.

I touch my bottom lip with my index finger and whisper an apology that sticks in my throat. Apologies are never for the people you want to forgive you. They're for you - so you can forgive yourself. Gale told me that, and I know it's true because I need to say the words even if he can't hear them.

And even though I'm hoping he knows I'm sorry, I'm really truly sorry, I hope he also knows that I'm not asking for forgiveness. I would never ask that from him. We've had to forgive a lot of people in our lives and we had to live with the affect those words can have on you when you don't mean them.

So I don't ask that of Gale. Especially because I don't even deserve it.

I think about Dad. How disappointed he'd be to know that I turned out the way that I did. I think about how the last he knew of me was as a moody thirteen year old who demanded things we couldn't afford, like vacations and name brand sneakers and a computer. I think about my grades, the fights I got in regularly. I think about the words "problem child"- how my dad hung his head in the parent-teacher meeting where told him I punched Cato Howards in the throat. I think about the nights he went hungry so me and Prim and Mom could split the last potato or cup of lentils, and how I never appreciated that either, just whined about how we couldn't afford to eat at a restaurant.

Dark shadows dance on the wall and I watch them like a movie. I remember words and faces I'd left behind. I remember the night Gale proposed.

Then I open my mouth and sing, because there's nothing I can do to fix anything, and I don't even know how much of _me_ is even left.

* * *

After that, I sort of … _slip_.

Like I've been crawling up a wet slide.

There's no other way to describe it; no clearly defined moment when I realize it's happening. Just bits and pieces that start to add up, like the morning I look in the mirror and don't recognize the vacant expression on my face. Like when I start to forget what I'm saying half-way through my thought. When I start to get tired before the sun has even set.

An emptiness hums steadily in my chest and drowns out the drum of my heart until it's nothing but static.

I'm fuzzy and hollow, drifting like a loose spiderweb. Or dust in the sunlight. I forget to buy groceries one week, and realize I hadn't noticed because I'd forgotten to eat for two days. _Oh well. _I crawl into bed. Turn out the light. Wake up the next morning. Do it all again.

By the time I realize something is wrong, it's too late. Johanna knows before I do because suddenly she won't leave me alone. She wants to talk, but I don't even catch half of what she says. It's too much. Too fast. _I'm so tired._ Then the morning comes that I wake up with not a single word left in my mouth - and no air left in my chest to expel it even if there had been. Lethargy seeps into my limbs, and my eyes sullenly trace the beams of wood that arch over my head to where they connect in the middle of my house.

Moving my swollen tongue around in my mouth, tasting the sourness of my teeth and cheeks, I decide I'm not getting up.

One day. Two days. I don't move. I stare with hot eyes at the ceiling, following the same lines over and over without comprehension of how they all fit together. Sometimes a burning moisture stings the outermost corners of my eyes and I understand objectively that I am crying, but not when I started or how I transition from that to sleeping, to waking up with my sight trained at a different part of the house entirely.

The blankets are torn off me on day three, and I glare viciously at Johanna as she throws them across the room.

"Up. Get up. Get _up_. You stink. You haven't been to work in days. Whatever shit this is, it stops _now._"

Hoping that '_now_' is negotiable, I resign myself to the chill on my skin as I roll away from her. An unreal familiarity, something like de ja vu, washes over me then ebbs away.

My weakness must disgust her, because she storms out of the house. I wouldn't blame her if it did. I can't even get out of bed to get my blanket back. I even disgust myself.

Darkness creeps in. I sink into the black-and-blue shadows of the night without moving. Distantly I realize that she will fire me and I will lose everything I have built for myself here, but I can't bring myself to care. What difference will it make if I sleep here, or somewhere else entirely? The nightmares will be the same no matter where I am.

I am closing my eyes when the door swings open. Johanna must be back for another round. The bathroom light clicks on. I hear the shower curtain being pulled back and water thundering against the bottom of the tub. Heavy footsteps I don't recognize.

Then, he's there, sweeping my greasy hair out of my face with a soft frown.

"Hi. Johanna said you'd need some convincing, but she'd like you to get up."

I don't say anything, but unlike Johanna, Peeta Mellark doesn't need me to speak to understand that I'm not leaving this bed on my own. He lifts me gently and holds me against his chest like I am nothing more than a child.

For the first time in days I feel something that isn't bottomless lethargy. It's viscous and boiling, snapping and popping in my chest like hot oil- a spotty, dirty concoction of fear, shame and anger. How _dare_ he touch me. How dare he see me, when I am _this. _

But he is disconcertingly warm. Alien and solid. It's been so long since someone has touched me. I can't believe how much I've missed it. It easily could be my energy leaking away from me again, but I decide not to fight. If he was going to hurt me, he would have already done it. My body slumps against his chest and my fingers twist loosely in his shirt.

In the bathroom, he settles me with my back against the tub, gently tipping my head back until it hits a towel he has laid over the porcelain. My hair hangs in loopy knots and whisper-like tugs of my scalp tell me that it has hit water and is swirling in the rushing bath.

"What are you doing?" says a crackling voice that sounds very much like mine.

"Johanna is worried about you. She's not really… equipped to watch this happen to someone else. She's a good friend of mine, and now you've got me worried about her too."

_Someone else._ Relief prickles along my skin. At least I am not alone in my misery.

I am glaring at him as his hands run through my hair, wetting the strands from tip to scalp. Goose bumps race along my skin and I am grateful for the long sleeved shirt that hides my arms. Though the water is warm, my hair turns cold and a shiver nips a trail down my spine.

At some point, my eyelids sink down over my eyes, and I realize how hot they are. They're burning. Liquid eases out from underneath them, and I am horrified to discover that I am crying, and the tears are dripping down into my hair.

I decide that I hate Peeta Mellark.

He finishes soaping my hair, and is just beginning to rinse it when I push him roughly away with my arm, sending him backwards. For a moment, there is a tense stillness between us. He watches me nervously as I glare at him with swollen, furious eyes.

"Sorry," he murmurs in surprise as his face burns pink. He stumbles a little as he stands. "You want to finish on your own?"

Shaking with anger, I feel my face twisting into a snarl.

"I never needed your help."

"Ok. I'm sorry. I'll be right outside."

The snick of the door closing triggers a quiver in my lip and I clench my jaw to keep myself from screaming. I think frantically, where can I burrow myself?

Underwater.

So that's where I go. I strip, sink myself into the water in the tub until I am completely submerged. I meant to cry here, but the heat from the water smoothes out the tension in my jaw and neck and suddenly I am more exhausted than angry. Every light clink and rustle is magnified a hundred times and I catch a glimpse of a smaller, quieter world. I stay under until my need for air becomes overwhelming.

When I emerge from the tub, fragrant and warm, my skin puckering and my hair in a loose, wet braid, I feel something shift inside of me. Not better. Not different. But like I have refocused the camera in my mind.

As I leave the bathroom, Peeta is leaning against the wall with his head back and his eyes closed. They flutter open when I walk into the room dressed in my old, sour clothes.

He sits me on the bed. I mean to fight him again, but I am losing my will to do much of anything besides crawl back underneath the blanket and find my way back to sleep. A steadying hand on my shoulder is my only clue that I had been listing to the side.

"Not yet. You need to eat something."

He puts something round in my hands, and when the smell of it hits me, I feel hungry in a way I haven't felt in forever.

Its bread. And its _warm_.

"I'm going to check on Johanna now. I'll be back tomorrow."

And then he's gone.

I try to eat. Because I should. Because I know I have to. Because my stomach feels cavernous, and even though I've managed to ignore it, it does actually hurt.

Mechanical. That's how I do it. I am a machine and I need fuel. Bite after bite, until I've eaten nearly half. Then I'm too tired and I need to rest.

My bed smells like a sick body, pungent and heady, but I'm too tired to care.

Finally, I roll onto my side. Tuck my legs into my body. Sleep.

For the first time since I left Boulder, I don't dream at all. It's a real sleep, with no voices, or flames or racing hearts. Like dense black wool, it swaddles me in a heavy silence that takes me hours to crawl my way out of.

When I wake up, the sun hasn't risen. I lie there staring up into the indigo sky from the window that sits above my bed and I understand why this feels familiar. I was once on the other side of this, from the outside looking in. With Mom.

_I remember the slippery silk of her pale gold hair in my hands. The smell of Johnson's soap and human sick. Her eyes, pillowed in the dark folds of her lids, drifting shut. Midway through, I am screaming her awake because she's stopped breathing in her sleep. Its just apnea. She's not really dead. Gasping and sputtering, she mumbles out a disjointed apology. The shampoo bottle has fallen in the bath water and as she sits up, I understand that this must happen often. I have only caught a glimpse. _

_The bottle bobs by, its promise of 'No Tears!' peeking out through the suds on the surface of the water. I am furious. I am helpless._

_The oxycontin she's addicted to will kill her. And there is nothing I can do._

When Peeta arrives to check on me that morning I am already dressed, tying the laces of my boots on the front porch. I meet his eyes. The knot is a promise - I don't need to watch my fingers as they pull it tight.

I stand and walk away. I have a dawn hike to lead, and no time to feel ashamed of what those blue eyes have seen of me.

* * *

**A/N:** So this roller-coaster of a fic is 'Home is in Your Skin'. As you can tell, I'll be dealing with some seriously dark content, but rest assured, this chapter is as bad as it will get in terms of angst. Everything from here on out gets better.

This is part two of my 'Without Series', inspired by toxic plants from around the world. This story is inspired by foxglove, and this AU is 'a world without Panem'.

I would like to dedicate this chapter to the wonderful folks who helped this fic happen:

-My good friend **M**, who's initial input was critical to helping me set the scene.

-My lovely pre-reader **Purple_Cube**, who helped me make some important decisions, and corrected every single instance of "its vs it's" through the entire chapter. If you haven't read her work yet, I so highly recommend that you do, because her work is awesome!

-And, finally, my _incredible_ beta **Opaque**, who's feedback and insight is not only mind-blowingly astute, but also comes from a deep understanding of the characters and themes of the Hunger Games. Where I'd be without her I don't know. But since she basically introduced me everything I know about Peeta, it would definitely be a world without him. And who wants that?

Questions? Comments? Updates and Outtakes? Come find me on tumblr (link is on my profile).

Thanks for reading!


	2. Hard World

Trigger Warning: Alcohol, abuse, abuse triggers.

* * *

**Home is in Your Skin**

"Real or not real, I am on fire."

* * *

_**ii.**_

I never want to see Peeta Mellark again. His pity is not something I need or want, especially because in the aftermath of my little episode, I'm actually doing good. Really good.

Spring is fading now, and so is my guilt. Bright heads of red clover shrivel and list in the hot glare of the summer sun, giving way to a carpeting of dandelions and proud stalks of quivering foxglove. Everything is taller and more- from the grass to the flowers- and I could disappear into it easily, if I wanted to. In the midst of all this death and overgrowth, there is something that quiets the howls of my ghosts and I can finally- finally- sleep. And I really don't need Peeta's misdirected knight in shining armor impulse to ruin this for me.

Of course, this is when he becomes impossible to avoid. Turns out he's something of a handyman, and shows up at least once a week with a new excuse on the tip of his tongue- a leaky gutter he's spotted on Cabin Seven, a broken window on Four, a pipe in Cabin One that he says is cracked but no one else seems to have noticed. I believe these claims as much as I believe anything anyone has ever told me- which is to say not at all. Johanna teases that he has a crush on me. I tell her to quit it, which she ignores, but at least she keeps her mouth shut about it when he's around.

Still, I find reasons to slip away when I see his truck pulling up in a choking sputter of dust and gravel. More often than not I am exhausted after hours of leading hikes in the baked summer air, so when I hide out in my cabin with the excuse of taking a nap, that's really what I'm doing. I hear his voice through the windows, which I have to keep open because its so sweltering inside. Laying on my mattress in a tangle of too-soft floral sheets, I close my eyes and pretend I don't hear him ask how I'm doing. I turn over. Tuck my nose in the seam between my arm and the mattress. I'm fine. I'm always fine. Its enough, for right now, that I can sleep when I close my eyes. I don't need anything else.

Unfortunately, Johanna doesn't see it this way. Half a cigarette hangs out of her mouth the afternoon I walk into her office and she glares at the laptop in front of her with an oddly anxious look on her face. I ignore it, all ready to tell her that I just finished my last hike, when she squints at her screen and ashes in an empty paper coffee cup next to her.

"You need new clothes," she says finally, without looking up. I frown and tug the hem of my oversized, long-sleeve tee down. It's an old one, that I will admit. But compared to some of my other clothes, it's not that bad. I spy a few pinprick holes dotting the neck of my shirt and suddenly remember that it's not my shirt at all. It's Gale's.

Maybe Johanna is right.

I've never really had new clothes. Not new new clothes. Just second hand, or stuff I find from thrift stores. Cheap and cheerful, as Dad used to say. Now I can afford them, but the thought of buying brand new clothing seems extravagant and absurd, especially considering where I'd have to go in order to get them. A mall. I'm putting it lightly when I say they're not my favorite places. Large crowds. Expensive junk. The air heavy with disinfectant, cloying perfume and dust.

'Feral' is what one of my social workers once called me. She meant it as an insult, but when I looked the word up later, I couldn't see how she could have possibly felt I'd take it that way. The dictionary said that it meant 'having escaped domestication'. If there's anything that's ever been true about me, it's that.

And a mall is no place for a feral girl.

Johanna seems to think so too, and that's how we end up at the Goodwill. On the way, Johanna pulls us through a Starbucks drive-through and orders me something chocolate and cold and covered in thick whipped cream.

"Let's make this a girl's day out," she says with a grin. I look at the drink and wonder if I think she's trying to fix what happened between us a few weeks back by never talking about it again. I'm going to hold out hope that her strategy actually works, because I really don't want to relive those days I spent in bed. I packaged that incident up, neat and tidy, and shoved it down somewhere deep. Dragging it all back out now would undo all of the work I've done to forget about it.

And I really want to forget.

When we get to Goodwill, we split up. Johanna is mumbling something about needing more coffee mugs, and I make my way toward the clothes, sucking the chocolate-coffee something or other through the green straw. Thrifting is equal parts skill and luck. You have to go early, go often, and go somewhere outside the city. Find a stretch of suburban wilderness, preferably one with people who don't need to shop at thrift stores, but like to donate to them. You know those places. Rich old women who like to pretend that donating a coat they barely wore from 'last season' is really doing something to fix the world.

Whatever they need to tell themselves, I guess.

After you find a good thrift store, it all comes down to skill and dedication. I may not have luck worth a damn, but I am a good hunter. In an hour I am proud to have a new wardrobe for less than fifty dollars. Black denim jeans that are already broken in. A few band tees I gleefully unearth in the boys section. A black leather jacket with long fringe in a v on the back and a seashell sewn onto the collar.

It's ugly, but something about it tugs at me. I've never seen the ocean, not in person, and this shell looks real. It's a token from a place I've never been, and can't rightly imagine. The shell is also ugly, pockmarked and dry, but that's why I think it's real and not sewn on by some fashion company. Why that shell? Where is it from? There's a story in this jacket, and I want to know it.

The only way to get that information would be to own it.

When Johanna finds me she makes me model my finds, tugging on the fit of the pants and checking the tooling of my jacket. She makes me put on one complete outfit, and I'm feeling giddy as I slide out of the dressing room and give her a quick twirl. The long fringe from the jacket swirls around me like a skirt, and I laugh so suddenly that I surprise even myself.

I must seem insane.

But who cares? The store is nearly empty, and laughing feels so good, so right, that I find myself letting Johanna mother-hen me. My cheeks are sore like the muscles there have forgotten what a smile feels like, but I don't want to think like this when today feels so infinite, so I tug on another outfit, waltz out of my dressing room like a prize pony and spin like I'm on a stage for all the world to see.

I don't only buy clothes. The good part about shopping nearly exclusively at thrift stores is that you learn to appreciate what's junk and what's not, and this place is a treasure trove. There are albums I've always wanted to own but never had the space or money to buy in the electronics section, and I dig to make sure I haven't missed anything. The advent of CD's and mp3 players brought a lot of old cassettes to thrift stores, and today they're ten cents each.

It's like Christmas, and for once I let my greediness lead me as I grab as many as I can hold and race to check out before I can change my mind. It all still comes out to less than fifty dollars, and the cassette player I pick up as well is so cheap I cackle when I find it. A teenage goodwill employee has to help me bring my stuff to Johanna's car, and feeling giddy, I thank him with a broad, breathless smile. On the way home, Johanna hands me a mug. It's enormous, practically a bowl, and while most of it is a dark brown, the rim is a pale milky white. Etched into the side are the words "I'm with stupid", with an arrow that would point to you if you drank from the mug using the handle. Clever.

But I see something else in the gift. Stupid is what she called me the first time we met. She blinks at the road in front of her as I cup the mug between my hands and stare at it. I have no idea how to respond, so I don't.

Instead of bringing my finds right inside, I immediately head for the only laundromat in town- a run down place with a sign that says SuperSuds in faded red lettering. The last thing I want is bed bugs - or anything else that might still be on these clothes. I pile my stuff into the washer and jam my new headphones on, snap a cassette into the player and close my eyes. Between my sugar crash from the starbucks chocolate-coffee thing and the whirring and heat from the machines I'm already drowsy, but the music is what sends me on my way toward a nap as I prop my head against the wall and let my eyes slide shut.

It's folk music, not something I'm familiar with. Jarring, energetic and melodic all at once, it definitely would not be Gale approved. But I am living a brave new life, one Gale has no place in. Not even his old t-shirts. Not anymore. I breathe deeply and let the music drag me under unfamiliar waters.

* * *

When I open my eyes, Peeta Mellark is sitting next to me.

Well, not right next to me. One seat over. But it's close enough. His hands are clasped loosely together as he leans over with his elbows on his bouncing knees, and he's watching the spanish language telenovela on the TV hanging up in far corner of the laundromat. How the hell did he find me here? Why won't he just leave me alone? He doesn't seem to know I'm awake yet. Could I kick his ass if I needed to?

I push myself up from my chair and am across the room in a few quick strides. He starts as soon as he sees me moving, and blushes so deeply he's nearly purple.

Well good. I hope he feels like a creep.

"Hi," he says quickly. "Sorry- I didn't mean to scare you. You were just sleeping and I didn't think it was a good idea for you to be asleep and alone here especially because-"

"Because I'm a girl, right?," I snap. "You can say it. Or is it especially because you think I'm weak?"

He lowers his eyes to his hands.

"Because you're new in town."

Oh. Well.

And I can't say anything to that without making an even bigger idiot out of myself, so I spin away and make a show of concentrating on switching my laundry from the washer to the dryer. When I turn back around, Peeta is frowning at me. I stop in my tracks.

"Listen," he says. "I'm sorry. But Johanna was beside herself, and I had to do something."

I purse my lips.

"Why are you following me?" I say, instead of responding directly to what he's said.

At this, he sets his jaw stubbornly.

"I'm not following you. You can't expect me to see someone, anyone, like that and not do everything in my power to- especially when it's someone like you, after-"

He loses his steam suddenly, and runs a hand back through his hair. Someone like you. What did he mean? I feel exposed, like everyone has known the things I've been trying to hide all along. I'm furious. I'm terrified.

I can't breathe.

The rise and fall of his adam's apple catches my eye, and then, something else does to. A scar. Its not even an inch long on the underside of his jaw. Its wide and jagged, like it hasn't healed right. I've seen ones like this before. I even have a few of my own. The scar is so old it's almost just a ghost, but I can see it clear as day. And I know how he got it. Someone hit him- and it's not instinct telling me that. It's experience. And then I know more about him than I ever wanted to. There was only ever one other person that this ever happened to me with.

We were like this with one another, Gale and I.

I blink, and I feel my brow furrow.

As far as I've ever seen, people only come in two breeds: those who hurt, and those who are hurt. Predator and prey. If you don't know which you are, there's probably a predator-type nearby who can clue you in. Gale taught me this, and I'll forever be grateful that it was him and not someone else, because for all I never deserved it, Gale loved me. And he was gentle, all things considered.

"You're an easy target," he'd say with a shrug. "There's just something about you."

And his pupils would grow fat and glint in a way that told me exactly how he felt about being a wolf guarding a lamb of his very own.

"Can we start over?" Peeta says, "Just forget the whole thing?"

I don't think he wants to hurt me. There is something about his face- so open and honest. I hate it. I can myself reflected in his eyes: shoulders tight, face stony.

"Please?"

Maybe I'm curious. Maybe Gale was right about me- I'm an easy victim. I give people too many chances. I trust too easily. And then I am angry because Gale was one of those people I trusted too much and gave too many chances to, and didn't I already decide he has no place in my head anymore?

"Katniss," I declare, and stick my hand out.

He takes my hand in his own. It's strong and warm and my pulse jumps, beating an escalating rhythm in my ears. I want to wrench my hand away. I want to shove him into the wall and run off. I do neither.

As we shake hands, a slow, shy smile spreads on his face, lifting one corner of his mouth higher than the other.

"Nice to meet you. Again. I'm Peeta."

I try not to smile. It's not easy.

But I am lying to Peeta. I know I can't forget what he's done for me. I never will. And there's a part of me, somewhere secret and deep, that doesn't want to.

That afternoon, Peeta insists taking us to the diner next to the laundromat while our clothes are in the dryer. When we walk in, he holds the door for me. As I pass him, my eyes drift to his face. I catch a glimpse of his pupils as they grow fat and black like pooling ink.

I think of Gale's fingernails digging into my hips. The scrape of his teeth on my neck. He had been so convinced of my weakness. Was it this weakness that drove me to leave him? I have always suspected myself to be a factory defect. Not built with the right materials to meet the expectations of femininity.

I'm cold and trying to hide how my hands shake, but I order a milkshake anyway. Strawberry. Its pink and thick and clings to my lips and throat. Peeta watches the cherry I get on top disappear into my mouth. Does he know that I am a monster?

I focus on the sweetness and cold on my tongue and let Peeta do the talking. Keep my eyes on the disappearing frothy pink in the glass in front of me, looking up just enough to watch him carefully through my lashes. Just in case.

Gale's voice rages in my head. If he finds me- If he could see what I'm doing- If he knew-

Peeta offers me some of his fries. My lips peel back off my teeth. My cheeks tighten and bunch. What I give him is not so much a smile as it is baring my teeth. Like a cornered animal. Like something feral.

He gives me the real thing in return. Pushes his fries toward me.

"Come on. Help me out here. Tell me you're not one of those people who don't like ketchup."

When he reaches suddenly to take a fry, I flinch.

And that's how, just like the scar on Peeta's jaw, I give myself away.

I don't remember the drive home, except for the smell of fresh laundry and the cool air that whipped through my open window and swept sweat soaked tendrils of hair off my brow. I floor it and feel my engine shudder and roar. The sound vibrates in my chest and my heart batters itself against the barricade of my ribs.

I try remind myself that Gale can't hurt me if he doesn't even know where to find me, and if he knew where I was he wouldn't have wasted any time dragging me back to Boulder. So there's really no reason for me to be this afraid of what he'd do if he knew that I-

I shake my head. I don't belong to him. I don't belong to anyone. For better or worse, I am alone.

Desperately, completely alone.

Months ago, back I was shivering under the moldy quilt in my car, I dreamed of being tucked into someone's arms- of a warmth and safety I couldn't possibly achieve for myself. I fairly ached for something I never even knew I needed until the very moment I felt it. But it doesn't matter- the price of those arms will be measured in pounds of flesh, and I have already been hollowed to my rind.

I shouldn't- I can't- trust Peeta.

I'm not looking for trouble, but it finds me anyway a week later when I come home from leading a hike to find three cops on my porch. Their black boots are shined to fascist perfection, and glow in the fading light. They're talking to Johanna, showing her something which makes her face pinch tight. Johanna shakes her head, and as she does, her eyes find me and she motions me over. I am about to bolt when one of the cops turns around and levels me with a piercing stare. I swallow hard and consider my options.

If I run now, I know they will chase me.

What will they do if I stay?

My hands are shaking again. I shove them in my pockets and clench my arms to my side when the shakes rattle up my arms.

"Ma'am," says the cop with the piercing eyes. "You mind talking to us for a minute?"

"Yeah," I say. "Sure. No problem."

But it is a problem. Because they're not looking for me, but another girl who they think passed through here, and when they show me her face its on a poster with big block letters at the top that say 'MISSING'. For a moment, I imagine this same poster in Gale's hands, only it's my picture and my name, and below that a list of features that should be clinical but feel like they're already describing a corpse.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I haven't seen her."

It's the truth, and also not. I haven't seen her, not really, but I see something like her in my mirror. We're both lost. Or missing. Or just plain gone.

"Hope she turns up."

My voice cracks as I say this. I hope she's not dead. I hope she's ok. Maybe she's like me, running hard and hoping to never be found. The other cop eyes me. He's dark-skinned and tall, and I can see in the way he watches my twitching arms that I am not fooling him. But he smiles as if nothing is wrong and thanks me.

As the cops pull away, Johanna eyes me strangely but I slip into my cabin before she can say anything.

I turn the stove on. Put my tea kettle on the burner. I feel the warmth radiating off the stove and hitting my skin in gentle waves. Why did I think Gale would be angry instead of worried? What if Gale thought I was dead? He was always so ready to believe that I would be hopeless on my own. Maybe he missed me. Maybe he thought I was dead. Maybe he was looking for me, that same puppy-dog look on his face he got after he knew he did something really stupid.

"You can't leave me, Catnip. It would kill me if you left."

I feel hot and sick, and I'm trembling like I have a fever, only it's not from chills but from pent up energy. I walk over to my mattress and sink down, letting my face fall into my hands. My brain is a broken television, filling my head with static and flipping channels so fast its making me nauseous.

Air. I need air.

In a daze I turn the stove off, then I burst out of my cabin and into the night. Or, I mean to, but Peeta is standing on my porch with his baseball hat in his hands, looking for all the world like he himself might throw up too. Looks like this just turned into a party.

"Hi, um, I was just-"

"I'm leaving."

"Oh. Um, plans tonight?"

"No."

Until this point, that sick dread in my stomach has been the only thing driving me forward, all trembling energy and cold sweat. But there's something about Peeta that makes it rinse away like mud under a hot faucet. I feel the warmth rush back into the skin on my cheeks and ball my hands up in a useless attempt to maintain some type of control. Over Peeta's shoulder, his truck is idling with the cab light on. The cholicky grunts of the engine vibrates in my bones and fills my ears.

"Um, well, if you're not busy- God I am going to sound like a creep- I heard the music in your headphones at the laundromat, they're actually a local band and they're playing tonight, I thought you might want to-"

"Yes!" I blurt. Maybe too quickly. I don't want him to get the wrong idea, but I already opened my fat mouth. And I do want to go. I want to go so bad I don't even care what Peeta is thinking, I just want to sit in that beast of a truck of his and feel it roar as we peel down the road. I want to watch the world melt into a blur outside my window.

"Cool- um. Do you want to head out now? It starts soon so-"

"Now is perfect," I say breathlessly, and hop down the steps of my porch without looking backward. I only catch a glimpse of his face, but I regret it all the same. Because he doesn't know- he has no idea- how toxic I really am. I shouldn't do this. I wrench the passenger side door to his truck open and climb in, trying to keep my knees from bouncing and drawing his attention to them as he joins me.

His fingers twist the key in the ignition, and in the split second before the engine starts I am aching so horribly to know what those fingers feel like ghosting the slick column of my neck that I shock myself into forgetting to breathe.

The headlights burst to life. In the suddenness of the light I see the grass illuminated for tens of feet in front of us, and everything else disappears into darkness. The headlights swing around, flying across cabins and the still smoking fire pit they're gathered around, before splashing across the gravel road leading to the highway. Peeta punches the gas, and my eyes swing across the dashboard to his face, and then bounce upwards to the sky, pink and black-blue and sugared with timid stars. Feathery stripes of clouds hang still and placid, and the moon is nowhere to be found.

I'm so absorbed with the sky that I don't realize Peeta has been talking.

"Sorry- what?"

He clears his throat.

"I said- where are you from? You know. Originally."

Well. How the fuck am I supposed to answer that? I immediately dismiss the idea of telling him the truth, even though I remember the feeling of his hands in my hair and I can't bring myself to believe someone with hands that gentle and steady is untrustworthy. He's just trying to be nice, and doesn't deserve me to snap at him. I frown up at the stars of Cassiopeia like I could bully them into divining an answer for me.

"Estes Park is pretty small," Peeta continues slowly, after I fail to answer him for an awkwardly long amount of time. "Not often someone like you moves here."

"You keep saying that."

"Saying what?"

" 'Someone like you'. What does that even mean? What am I 'like'?"

I sense him stiffen, but then he smiles like he can't to stop himself and shakes his head slowly.

"You don't even know, do you? The kind of effect you have on people."

My heart jumps. What does that mean? What effect do I have? He barely knows me. Hell, nobody here knows me. I'm really just another face on a wanted poster no one's paying attention to. But I want it that way. I don't want to be noticed or remembered, or, worse still, form the kind of relationships with people that would make it so I couldn't leave this place the minute I need to. And I might need to, one day. I chew the side of my thumb and try not to look as anxious as I feel. I don't want to affect anyone.

Peetas laughs suddenly and I feel heat bloom in my cheeks and chest as I realize I must have said that last part out loud. I make for poor company after that, because I'm so focused on not blurting out all the things I can't say that all I can do is grunt or nod my head to what he says, none of which I rightly catch anyway. When we pull up a long dirt road to a house set far back in the trees I nearly sigh with relief. It's a good thing I didn't though. I'd be sucking that same stale air right back in because Peeta has taken me somewhere magical.

Lights are everywhere- bobbing along the road as we pull in, hanging suspended in the surrounding forest like tiny stars, and strung along the roof of the house, which is old and very small. The give off just enough light to see the carpeting of foxglove that swallows the roots of the yard out front is littered with battered old chairs and scrubby little bushes, and the porch steps have even more of those fairy like lights lining its perimeter. But even all these lamps can only do so much to scrub away the inky blackness of the Colorado night, especially with all these trees to lock it in.

Prim would have loved this place. I squint at the lights as they blur and dissolve.

There's a tight, tangled lump of something in my chest that I know no amount of swallowing can soothe.

"Hey."

Peeta's voice cuts through my thoughts. The door is open, and he's standing with his hand outstretched towards me. When did that happen? Gentle waves of sound lap at my ears- voices, tinkling bottles, rhythmic footsteps. I blink quickly and my eyes dart from his hand to his face. "Everything ok?"

The truth is no, everything is not ok. Nothing is ok. In fact, everything is fucked. Something dense and rotten bursts in my chest as I stare below Peeta's outstretched hand at his boots. I feel it crumbling and collecting in my stomach, where the muscles clench hot and hard. When I got in Peeta's car I just wanted to drive- I didn't mean to actually end up somewhere.

"When you look like that-" he says, then shakes his head. "I wish I knew where it is in your head that you've gone."

I jerk my head up, fuery flaming in my chest. But it's not pity I find in his eyes, it's just sadness.

"I don't need-"

"I know."

My cheeks flame but the blaze of my anger is snuffed out just as quickly as it caught, and now there's nothing left except-

Except that ache, raw and hungry as ever, but twice as urgent. A guttural sound, something between a groan and a whimper works its way through my chest only to die in my mouth. I think Peeta hears it anyway.

He reaches out suddenly, as if to catch me, but I'm not falling. I eye his hands warily.

"I wish you would ask me for something," he says urgently. Of course he does. He's used to being asked to fix things. It's what he's good at it. But I'm not broken, and I don't need anyone save me.

"Help me forget."

My voice cracks as I say the words I never meant to let escape, and because of that I know they're what I really want. There is nothing that can fix that ache, nothing I can afford, anyway. So I'm fine. Really. I'm still here- alive, somehow- even though I don't deserve to be.

He offers his hand to me a second time. The ache grows- doubles- multiples. My fingers twitch.

* * *

The inside of that little cabin stays a mystery. Maybe its better that way-I'll never imagine my father at it's stove, or Prim playing on it's floor. I'm trying to run from my ghosts tonight, not find them somewhere new.

Peeta leads me around to the back, where even more lights are strung over our heads in an arching, uneven grid that spans from tree to towering tree. His eyes are bright as they peek at me over his shoulder. He's smiling maybe, and his hands-

I was right about them.

They can be trusted. Large and calloused. Steady and protective. Gentle. So gentle. I don't know if you can or should judge someone by their hands, but since I've already gone and done it, I guess it doesn't matter, and if Peeta's hands are any indication at all of what kind of person he is then I've always been doomed anyway. He buys me a beer, presses it cold and wet into my hand. I look into his eyes as I put the rim of the bottle to my lips. Do you know, Peeta? What it is that you've promised?

I am unsurprised to learn how many people know Peeta here. There is a flurry of names and faces I don't try to remember, hoping they'll grant me the same courtesy. I'm just Katniss, his friend from out of town. Polite smiles, curious eyes, 'nice-to-meet-you's'. I mostly hide behind my bottle.

That is, until the music starts.

The first chords of the fiddle slice through a curtain of murmurs and settle themselves in my chest, nestled in the small hollows of my heart. They balloon as the music swells, and the blood in my veins surges.

Peeta's hand is too tight, and I-

My bones are too still, I need to-

I tug him with me to the front of the crowd, where a messy jumble of bodies have gathered to shake themselves loose. I feel him hesitate and turn back.

"Come with me," I urge.

His hand tightens around mine, but I am not afraid. I slip away, throwing myself into the swarming mass of sweating, bouncing bodies. My heart swells and thunders in my chest as I am pitched and pulled in a violent tide of hands and shoulders. I absently realize that I know the song the band is playing, but it's only because I am singing it. It's my voice that's rising high and bright above all the rest, and I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. I feel the pulse of other voices around me, the vibrations of feet on earth, and the crash of drums in my chest.

And thats when I realize what we're singing. 'Nobody calls for me- Nobody hunts for me- They don't seem to know I'm gone-' All these voices. How many actually know what it is to be lost? I close my eyes and all I see is the face of the girl from the wanted poster. I am already forgetting why I left Boulder. Already forgetting why I'm here. Already forgetting not to regret.

Something far too solid slams into my back and I am thrown out of the pit and into a waiting pair of hands. For a moment I worry about how there doesn't seem to be any air left in my lungs, but it's only when my eyes fly open that realize I knew nothing about needing air until I knew Peeta Mellark. Because that's who's hand is cradling my cheek, the other light on my waist, his eyes so wide and starry-blue I forget everything else. Even the music. The way he's looking at me- I don't understand what it means.

But I do understand one thing. I can't stop running. Not yet.

If I stay much longer, Peeta will catch me.


	3. Don't Worry Baby

_**Home is in Your Skin**_

_"Real or not real, I am on fire."_

* * *

_**iii.**_

_"Even your feet are small," Gale says as he places my boot on his thigh. From his position on his knees in front of my chair he can easily see more of my face than I could possibly hide, but I guess it doesn't matter. He doesn't need to see me to know that his comment sent the blood rushing to my face. Whether or not I'm actually that small, it's how he makes me feel. Part of it is that he's a pretty big guy, and part of it… Part of it is just Gale. Especially when we're alone, like now. He smirks as he sets to work untying my boot with sure, quick jerks of his long fingers._

_Jackass._

_When he finishes the tongue of my boot flops forward and his eyes drift up to mine. There's something in them that I've only seen a few times before- something soft. Almost indulgent. He traces the newly bare skin of my ankle with a single finger and a chill works its way up my spine. It's affectionate and so unlike him that I hardly dare to breathe. What is it that he's thinking? I know asking won't do any good. Gale is like me. We can't ever be so honest as to lay ourselves bare before another person._

_Without warning he jerks my loosely booted foot up and kisses the rubber of my sole, his eyes locked on mine. Something quakes inside me. I don't know what's happening, or why it's significant, but I realize with startlingly clarity that I will remember this moment. That it will become significant in some way later on down the line. I squeal and try to wrench my leg back, and in the process Gale manages to open my legs wide enough to squeeze his shoulders between them, effectively cutting me off from closing them again. I blush hot and dark and Gale smiles like an alligator- all teeth._

_But his eyes... They stay honest._

_So I know he means it when he breathes-_

_"Christ Katniss. You're beautiful, you know that?"_

* * *

The sun hasn't risen yet but I am awake.

A noise escapes me- a funny little thing, low and sweet in my throat. These last few moments steeped in darkness always feel so infinite. My eyelids sink shut and I twist around in my warm cocoon, rubbing my cold feet on the sheets in an effort to chase the chill in my toes away.

I could put socks on but I'm in no hurry to get out of bed. I have an old flip alarm clock from the seventies that is set to go off every morning at five thirty, and this morning I'm proud to have beaten it. When it goes off I roll out of bed, turn the tea on and dive back under my blankets for a few more cozy minutes until the kettle yowls. I'm still not really ready to be awake when it does, but I yank my pants on anyway as I shuffle to turn it off. I'm wearing the same Black Sabbath sweatshirt that I tugged on last night- it's practically a dress and I have to roll the sleeves up so they don't fall over my hands. In this weather I'm grateful that it's so thin, because wearing long sleeves all the time means I'm even sticky at night.

But at least I don't have to confront my scars first thing in the morning.

I brew an entire thermos of lemon tea- my favorite- and shove it in my little denim backpack along with an apple and a hunk of cheese. Then I fly out the door and hike up the road north a little ways. On the shoulder of the road there's a spot where tourists can pull over. The view- I can't do it justice with words. Down the mountain you can see for miles- dense patches of trees, jagged rocky outcroppings- and wildflowers. Huge fields of them, with pikas diving in and out of their burroughs, rustling the tall grass all around them and chittering faintly in the near airless silence.

Usually I only just make it before a sliver of light cracks open on the horizon. Today I perch myself on the guardrail fifteen minutes early. This mountain air, I'm not sure I'll ever get accustomed to it. It moves sweet and cold through my nose and into my lungs as I twist open my thermos and pour tea into the mug Johanna gave me. The warmth spreads through the ceramic and into my palm. I shiver and nearly spill my tea.

It may be summer, but it's still chilly in the morning up here.

Stillness fills me as the sun rises. Even though it's the same every day, it never fails to make my breath catch in my throat. In the past, I missed more sunrises than I ever managed to catch even a glimpse of. In Boulder I worked nights as a waitress to help pay for the rent on the apartment I shared with Gale and three other people. It was cramped. Musky. And so dark. Parties every weekend. Forties and empties stacked like trophies on the coffee table. I remember it like I was being swallowed. Gale and I shared a room, and just about everything else too. I went where he went. I did what he did. He was my best friend. My only friend.

The only person in the world I trusted.

How many times have I wondered if he-

A sharp pain erupts on my thigh. I've spilled some of my tea.

I breathe deep. The sun is still rising. I have all the time I need to break and put myself back together before I have to be anywhere. I could cry. I could scream into the bright dawn, hurl some useless FUCKs into the rising sun, rail against the on-coming day as if that like it would do anything to stop it.

Instead I nurse my wounds as best as I know how in the new light, and finish my tea in aching silence.

Days pass and blur together.

A drowsy sweetness has settled in the sun-drenched afternoon air now that we're inching closer to late summer. With it comes dead grass that clumps around the houses like bedskirts, and dust that sneaks into every wrinkle of my clothes. But if it weren't for the sun, I wouldn't have any idea that time was passing at all. I crawl into my house as it sets only to slink back out just before it rises, except for the nights when I lay flat on my back in bed staring up at the stars through my window, wondering how the hell I ended up here.

I try to think my way out of Estes Park and come up blank. Where else is there to go? San Francisco. Chicago. Albuquerque. But how would I get to these places? What would I do when I did? I have no money. No plan. And I'm all alone. No family. No friends. If I leave Estes Park, I will have no one and nothing. But if I stay...

My heart clenches hard in my chest. I close my eyes but don't sleep for a long, long time.

Come hell or high water, though, I get myself out of bed.

It's a rule I have. One of many new rules, in fact, that I've made since the night Peeta took me to the show. Eat every four hours. Go to sleep with the sun. Rise before it. Rinse, lather, repeat. It makes it easier on those days when I wake up lost in the fog, and ensures I'll never fall so far that someone else will have to catch me. I don't have to think. I just have to do. Half the battle is already won. And since I've woken up lost more times in the past week than I care to count, I really need that.

I'm having one of those days when Johanna catches me slinking home after leading a disaster of a hike. Mud coats my boots and the bottom of my pants, all the way to mid-shin. There's even some in my hair somehow, which I only realize when she points it out to me.

"You're a mess," she laughs into her beer bottle as she takes a sip. "Where did you take those poor people?"

I shrug and can't bring myself to say anything back. It's the same trail I always take them on, but it rained last night and the valley turned into a stinking, squelching mud pit that hadn't dried despite the heat.

"That rough, huh?"

I nod and shift on my feet, trying to hide the way my eyes flicker longingly to my cabin by ducking my head a little. Why is she talking to me? Can't she just leave me alone with my mud and sweat soaked clothes? All I want is a shower. Maybe an apple with peanut butter and some tea. Then I want to collapse on my mattress and just not be.

"Come have a beer then."

I've never wanted to do anything less.

"I'm tired."

"Yeah, and filthy. Come have one anyway. Then you can go hide out in your cave."

She gestures toward my cabin with a wave of her hand, then settles that hand on her hip while the other hangs at her side clutching the neck of her beer like she's strangling it.

"You've been a hermit all week. One beer. That's it."

I swallow and fidget with my pockets. Maybe she's right. Peeta said she had been worried about me. Said she couldn't watch someone else go through that. He implied it was something that happened to her too. I remember those days in bed when I couldn't bring myself to move. What would I feel if I had to watch that happen to someone else, knowing what I do now? I clear my throat. Is she worried about me?

"One beer."

I follow her back to her cabin where she rustles up a bottle from her fridge. She cracks it open and hands it to me, and I take a quick swig just to keep my promise. I give her a weak smile and trail behind her out onto her back porch. And that's where I learn that Johanna is much, much smarter than I ever knew.

Because Peeta is sitting on her porch, holding his baseball cap in his hands and staring up at me with something between horror and humiliation. It's as if Johanna knew all along that he hadn't spoken a word to me in over a week- not since the show. I bet she did, the way her lips twitch into a smirk that only lasts for a blink of an eye.

"Mellark," she barks. "Give the lady a chair."

Peeta jumps up as if Johanna tagged him with a cattle prod, and my chest does that funny thing that only happens when he's around where it melts and clenches all at once. But I am too tired to play these kinds of games.

"Don't bother," I manage with an awkward shrug. "I'm just- I'm gonna go home."

I ignore the gnawing pit in my stomach as I turn around. It has nothing to do with hunger and thus I can't do anything about it. Peeta has been avoiding me, and I don't know why, but I do know that it has written in my flesh something I have been afraid of: I am too easily charmed. Too quick to trust. Long, sharp strides back to my cabin punctuate the venom pounding in my head. I should have known better.

Well.

I guess I did. I guess I did know that I couldn't trust him. I did always suspect that he would be dangerous in a way I couldn't anticipate; this boy with gentle hands, easy smiles and eyes like stars could only be hiding something. I should be thankful that his game with me ended before he truly sunk his teeth in and I woke up one day missing something vital.

Especially when there was so little of me left to lose.

I hear Peeta's heavy footsteps on the dry packed earth behind me and speed up.

"Katniss!"

My jaw tightens as I ignore Peeta and stomp up the steps to my own porch, yanking my keys out of my pocket and jamming them in my door.

"Katniss, wait."

I don't. But that doesn't help. Even slamming my door in his face doesn't help, and then I am left with nothing to take out my anger on.

"Please open the door Katniss. I just want to talk to you."

My nostrils flare and I breathe steady and hard as I glare at the door. If Peeta wanted to talk he could have tried doing that a week ago. I don't give a shit what he has to say now.

"Katniss, please. Please let me in."

I hear a dull thunk against my door. His head, maybe. He groans and mumbles something that sounds like "idiot".

"Look, I'm sorry Katniss. I'm really sorry. Please, can we talk?"

I almost tell him apologies are meaningless. I almost tell him that forgiveness isn't real, especially when it comes from me. I almost tell him to go fuck himself. Instead I swing the door wide open and glare at him with wild eyes.

"What the fuck do you want from me, Peeta?"

The words startle me when I finally manage to bite them out. I mean them, but I have no idea where they came from. Now that they're said though, I realize that's what the real problem is. That I have no idea at all what he wants, and why it is that every time I don't see his truck pulled up at Johanna's cabin I feel a twinge of emptiness that echoes somewhere deep and excruciatingly hollow inside of me. And I don't like it. I don't want to care about his stupid truck. I don't want to care about him.

And yet here I am.

Peeta's cheeks burn dark, but he doesn't look away like I expect him too. Instead, he looks at me with eyes wide and pale like little blue moons, as if he's seeing me really for the first time. And it makes something fragile inside of me crack. Until now, he's been fooling himself into thinking I'm someone else. But finally Peeta can see what I am. A keening ache uncurls itself from inside that fragile, now broken, thing. I never wanted his attention. I never wanted his friendship. I'm better off on my own, where no one can be surprised at who I really am. Alone is easy. Alone is safe.

Peeta clears his throat.

"I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry. That I fucked up, I realize that, and you have every right to be angry. I would be if I were you. And- And that's it."

A heavy beat of silence follows his words, where I fidget and he's still as stone and the drone of crickets becomes so loud I can hardly think. At least, that's what I think the buzzing in my head is. All I want is to crawl into bed, slide under my sheets and leave all of this on my doorstep, where I can kick it down the porch steps tomorrow morning and throw it right in the dumpster.

I stare at him, blinking blearily as I try and fail to make sense of a single thing he said. And then, because I can't think of anything else to say, I swallow and mutter a disingenuous-

"Fine."

Then I close the door and curl into a tight ball in my bed and even though I'm exhausted, it's still a long while before I manage to get any sleep.

The next time I open my door it's just before sunrise. Peeta is still there, but he looks so different and so serious that I can hardly believe he's the same person.

"Katniss," he says, "I lied."

I nearly jump out of my skin.

"Have you been here all night?"

"No, I just-" he pops his hat off and scratches his forehead, half a smile tugging humorlessly at his lips. "-Couldn't sleep. Listen. Last night, you asked me what I wanted. It's a fair question, and I didn't give you a fair answer."

How had Peeta known that I meant so much more than what those few little words implied? What the fuck do you want from me? In the gentle morning air they feel so violent. I don't want to hear his answer. But I need to. That keening ache rises to a fever pitch. I can't look at him. My eyes plunge, but catch on what's in his hand.

Wildflowers.

"I had a whole thing planned. What I wanted to say. But none of it seems right now."

He seems almost ashamed. And sad. Like he's struggling to understand something and just can't quite seem to put the pieces together.

"And you're not that kind of girl anyway, are you?"

All I can do is stare at him. What does that mean? What kind of girl am I? I hardly even think of myself in those terms. Girl. Girl is something soft and new. Like the petals on a young rose, velvet and cream-pink. Prim was a girl. I'm nothing like that at all.

He steps closer to me. I inch back instinctively, and something passes across his face. Like I've answered his question even without saying a word.

"I want-" he starts, then pauses mulling his next words over carefully. "I want to see you smile. And laugh. I want you to be happy and warm and safe. That and so much more, Katniss. But most of all, I want to tell you that you're beautiful, and I want to be there when you believe it. If you'll let me, that is. Will you let me?"

He swallows.

"For you. If you'll have them."

The wildflowers. Mine? I swallow and take them from him. I understand their presence in my trembling fingers less than I would a chinese newspaper. I feel something rough and warm on my cheeks. It sweeps the arc of my cheekbones. I think it's his fingers, but I can't look up now or he'll see the burning moisture collecting in my eyes. I blink and it's too late. The wetness spills over and streaks down my face and there's not a damn thing I can do to stop it from splashing onto his fingers.

And then I fall completely apart.

But I know it would have happened anyway, because the sun never rises. I spend the day in bed wrapped in Peeta's arms. He strokes my hair. My face. My arms. I watch thunderclouds roiling in the sky outside my window through hot, wet eyes that don't stop leaking until I shut them to sleep, and then I wake up screaming. He opens my windows when the rain starts and I drink tea that I can't taste with my back settled against his chest. We listen to the echo of the rain in my empty cabin, and he says things that etch themselves into my bones. But I could never repeat them, even to myself.

* * *

Thunderstorms seize the mountain in the days that come. They start out as black smudges on the horizon, blurring the line where sky meets earth. But as soon as they appear, they're barreling toward the mountain, trailing dark shadows and a gray column of rain in their wake. The rain the storms bring creates gushing rivers of water that cut across roads, making driving both dangerous and stupid.

But it doesn't matter. It's not like I'm going anywhere. I'd like to say that my new rules saved me, but as I stare unblinkingly up at the ceiling over my bed, I can't bring myself to even muster the energy I'd need to tell a lie like that. What they have given me is a compulsive need to just do until something makes sense. So while the world howls around me, I get up and putter around my cabin, absent-mindedly washing half the dishes and doing a fuck-all job of trying to make myself something to eat- Ritz crackers with cream cheese and a pickle. Good enough.

I put the plate on the table and remember my feet are cold. The temperature has plummeted so low that my breath hangs in the air when I open my door to see if it's still raining, and no amount of stoking the pitiful embers in my little fire place has done anything to chase the chill from my bones. I shuffle across the house to the milkcrate where I stuff my extra clothes and rifle through the measly selection of socks until I find the burly wool ones I wore when I left Boulder. For good measure, I pull on a giant brown button-up sweater that used to belong to my dad.

That's probably why I don't see Peeta's headlights, but I do hear his familiar frantic knock as I finish tugging it on over my head. It's been two days since I last saw him, and in that time I've done my best to forget what it was like to sleep in his arms. What it was like to feel his fingers in my hair. Because knowing these things is to want them, and I already ache for and from too much to survive wanting, and not having, one more thing.

When I swing my door open I'm not surprised to find Peeta. He seems way too pleased with himself, almost as if he knew the next words out of my mouth would be-

"You're an idiot."

And I mean it. Peeta should know better than to drive in this weather. Didn't Johanna tell him no one was supposed to come into work today? Something about the dimples on his cheeks and his lack of rain jacket tell me that whatever brought him out here wasn't work.

"Hey now. Be nice- I brought food."

"You could have died," I grumble as I move to the side and let him in.

"How do you know I didn't?" he asks with an infuriating wink that does nothing at all to settle the unexplained flutter in my stomach.

"Does that mean you're here to eat my brains?"

"Nope. I like your brains. You can keep them for now."

I roll my eyes.

"Gee, thanks."

Peeta sets a plastic bag full of white containers on my table and runs a hand through his shaggy, matted curls.

"You're going to catch a cold," I say, and shuffle toward my bathroom to fetch him a towel. I stop to glance in the mirror and feel a little silly when I brush my bangs back from my face.

When I come back, Peeta is smiling far too wide for my liking, but whatever is going on in his head he keeps to himself as I hand him the towel with a scowl.

"What's that?" he asks, pointing to my plate of nonsensical food. I flush. The crackers seem even more measly now that I've caught a tender, familiar scent wafting from the bag in his hand.

"Lunch," I mumble.

"Oh. Does that mean I'm too late?"

My stomach growls. Clearly Peeta is just in time. He doesn't say anything about my crackers as he pulls out several tupperware containers and begins to open them. Is it chicken soup he brought? It smells like it- warm and luscious and entirely too enticing. But whatever it is is thicker than soup. Darker too.

"It's stew," he explains. "My mom is a fantastic cook."

Feeling suddenly apprehensive, I turn around to grab bowls from the cabinet. Mom. The word feels alien and strange. I try not to think about it as I eat. Peeta's mother. What was she like? Did she disappear for days on end? Did she sell her wedding ring for a few pills? I sneak a look at Peeta from under my lashes, only to find him smirking at me.

"Good, isn't it?"

The truth is, it is. It's not like anything I've ever had before, slightly spicy and slightly sweet, but the chicken is savory, fall-off-bone moist and the warmth of it infuses every part of me with a gentle contentment that I haven't felt in-

And there I have to clamp down and can't think about it anymore. My throat is too tense to answer him so I shove another spoonful in my mouth and nod. It's just food, I tell myself. It doesn't mean anything.

The rain continues as we eat, pelting the roof and the side of my cabin loudly. It's only louder for how empty it is in here, and how temporary the life I've made here feels. Nothing says "I won't be here long" like a milk crate full of clothes and a mattress on the floor. I'm not embarrassed, really. I don't have enough money for a bedframe, and it's not like you really need one. I'm more conscious of the fact that there is so much unused space between the bed and the kitchen, the two little corners I curl myself into.

"So. I know you like folk music," Peeta says thoughtfully. "And classic metal is obvious."

He twirls his fork at my shirt, which you can see through the deep v of my sweater. Only the top of the design is visible, but no one could mistake the words for anything but 'Black Sabbath'.

"What else do you like?"

I shrug.

"Anything, really."

Peeta sits back in his chair, tugging something slim and silver from his pocket. He presses a button and a screen lights up blue and white. He fiddles with it, then passes me one of the earbuds.

"How about..."

He presses another button and the opening notes to something familiar and bouncy burst to life in my ear, but I can't say where or how I know it. He shows me a lot of songs like that- wisps of which I've heard here and there, but never much paid attention to. I don't want to admit that I'm paying attention to them now, but I forget myself and start humming along softly. I only realize what I'm doing when I look up to find him watching me carefully, an odd look in his eyes.

"What?"

He shakes his head, and disappears himself into choosing the next song. I look down at my hands, closed tight in my lap, and don't look up again until the music starts to play. This one I recognize by the tinkling of a woodblock and dreamy chords of guitar. I can't remember how I know it, a movie maybe, but I know the song, and, more importantly, the artist.

"Blondie?" I laugh.

"You got something to say about Blondie?"

I laugh again.

"Since we're sharing-" I say as I rip out the earbud and dance across the room to grab my walkman. I rifle through the tapes stacked next to my bed and snap one in the tape deck. When I come back Peeta reaches curiously for the walkman but I jerk it out of reach and switch his earbuds from his little device to my tape player. I smirk as he rolls his eyes at my show of secrecy.

"Don't want you to ruin your own surprise," I say dryly.

I hit play and within the first few notes of the vocalists harmonizing Peeta groans and smiles so wide I catch a glimpse of teeth as he drops his head into his hands and starts to laugh.

"Oh you're kidding. This is so much worse than Blondie."

He's right. It is, but I offer no excuse for the Beach Boys. Frankly, there isn't one. When he looks up at me, my smile grows all on its own.

"Come on," I say, and extend a hand down to him.

"What?"

I roll my eyes.

"Dance."

He flushes and shakes his head.

"No, no. I'm not really-"

But Peeta is dead wrong if he thought I'd take no for an answer this time around. And as much as he protests, he's still smiling and laughing as I drag him to his feet and out into the middle of my empty cabin. I show him where to put his hand on my hip, and I put my hands on his shoulders. Then I show him how to move, guiding him in slow circles around the center of the room and shuffling in time with the music. He tries his best to keep up, but it's a good thing I'm leading because Peeta has a very bad sense of rhythm.

But I don't care. I'm too delirious with that fluttering warmth from before, and Peeta could step on all my toes and I still wouldn't care. It's the food, I decide. It's the closest thing I've had to a homecooked meal since the fire. I must not be used to food that rich, it's not like my diet before was particularly hearty either.

Still, as I peak over Peeta's shoulder at the orange bursts of light streaking out from behind the dark clouds in the sky, I can't help the ache that flares to life - again. This time I don't try to reason with it. I let it consume me, just for a moment, while I borrow Peeta's strength and hide behind the cover of his proximity.

I do the worst thing I could ever possibly do. I let myself want. And oh, once I do, I know I'm in deep trouble. A burning tightness rises in my throat and I pull away and walk to the table under the guise of drinking water from my cup. As I do, I catch a glimpse of the screen of his device.

A message pops up in a dark translucent window.

**_Police Look to Estes Park as Search Continues for Missing Boulder Girl- Click to read full story_ **

I swallow.

And just like that, it becomes obvious that whether or not I have a plan, I have to leave this place. Really, I don't have any other choice.

* * *

_I am standing at the sink, up to my elbows in dishwater and soap. Nobody here knows how to wash a damn plate, but one way or another I make sure it gets done at least once a week. It's gotten to the point that I don't even feel the sting of hot water anymore. My hands are mostly chapped and dry anyway, and it's my own fault for losing my gloves at the very start of winter. Still, I can feel the soap working its way into my skin, stinging in the thousand cuts and cracks on my hands. I wonder if there will come a time when I'll stop feeling that too._

_It definitely won't be anytime soon. The skin on one of my knuckles splits open and a lightning fork of pain races up my arm. As I jerk my arm back, I stumble into someone behind me. Their hands hold my hips steady, then press them against the sink._

_"Cut it out," I snap._

_Fingers at the waist of my pants._

_"Come on," Gale whispers as he undoes the button of my jeans. "I haven't seen you all week."_

_It's true. I've been working hard, trying to save some money. I don't know what I'll use it for. It's not like I'm going anywhere. But I like the idea of having it, something that's just mine. Still, I've barely been home and when I am, I just collapse onto the mattress Gale and I share on the floor. A queen- Gale splurged._

_"I miss you."_

_I freeze and my insides turn to stone, then crumble to dust. I miss him too. Or I don't. I don't know. I don't miss him the way he misses me, I think. I miss him. The boy I used to know who snuck me the apples out of his lunch and shrugged away my thanks. I don't know this person whose hand is sliding between my thighs._

_I let him do what he wants until he decides it's over._

_Then I finish the dishes. Blood and bubbles and week old food all mix together in the drain trap, and I wonder if we have any band aids. By the time the sink drains I decide it doesn't matter._


	4. What a Girl Wants

**Home is in Your Skin**

"Real or not real, I am on fire."

* * *

**iv.**

I stand in the blazing red island of Peeta's tail lights, surrounded on all sides by a sea of black, my fingers curled in goodbye. It's remarkable how calm I am.

Seven days from now, I will disappear.

By this time next month I'll be somewhere new, with a job and a barren room at an Econo Lodge somewhere on the side of a highway. Or maybe I'll still be on the road, lost in the mountains of New Mexico, planning my next moves carefully from a nest of blankets in the backseat of my car. It all depends on how far I get before I run out of gas.

But it doesn't matter where I end up. I just can't stay here. Peeta and the taillights pull away. From his rearview mirror it must look like a black tide is creeping up all around me, and there I am waving as it closes over my face. That night I dream of strange cities with familiar lights and shadows that wind themselves around my ankles like snakes. I wake up with a heavy feeling in my chest- like I can't breathe- like I'll never breathe again - like I've just forgotten entirely how it works and am running out of time to remember.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and wheeze until the room stops spinning.

It's still dark, but every part of me refuses to move, so I set my eyes on the light creeping into the sky in the window over my bed and sink my nails into my scalp. I've missed the sunrise. It shouldn't matter. There will be more, I guess. But it feels as though I've squandered something vital. And maybe I have, because after that the sky clouds over and becomes a purgatory that allows neither rain nor light. It makes it that much harder to believe that all it will take to walk away from here and never look back is the promise of safety somewhere new.

And maybe I am not the liar I once was.

I'm weak now. Hobbled by kindnesses I couldn't turn away and accustomed to luxuries I could never afford to begin with. Some are pretty, useless things- flowers and sunrises and quiet. Some are more useful- money and food. Some things I can take with me when I go, like the mug Johanna bought me, my tapes and the only clothes that have ever really and truly been my own. But there are other things that I can't keep. The arms that held me, the hands that comforted me and the words that I can't bring myself to repeat for fear of staining them somehow. But they'll be retracted once I'm gone. He'll regret them. Say he never meant them in the first place. But Maybe it's better like that.

I'll need to forget them anyway, if I'm to move on.

I always knew Peeta's kindness, and this place, were never mine. I am- was- will be- just a visitor, and soon, a stranger. I was never anything better than a wild animal backed into a corner; equally as likely to bite the hand that feeds me as I am flee before it could even get close enough to offer me a damn thing.

Gale tried. Look what that got him.

So to do this, to really do this, I need to remember what it was that moved me forward the night I left.

But that's the whole problem. I came here to escape. To start over. To forget. And now I have to undo all that work and go back to who and what Johanna discovered on the side of the road that winter night. She's the key. She knows what I need in order to escape. So the next time I see that little crinkle between her eyes that says she's worried about me, I ask her for a beer. She gives me an atta-girl grin I can't return and waves a cigarette-wielding hand toward her cabin.

We end up on her porch, frosted bottles in our hands, bare feet propped up on the railing, slowly getting drunk as more dark clouds roll in overhead. I blot out what remains of the sun with my big toe and snort into my bottle in the middle of Johanna telling me about some blogger that called her today. I don't even know what a blog is. I take it as another sign that I need to get the hell out of here.

"Why axes?," I say suddenly. "Out of everything there is to collect- stamps, coins, baseball cards... Why axes?"

"Why not?" she says with a shrug.

I roll my eyes.

"That's not an answer."

"Fine. Then here's your real answer: why music?"

Music?

"I can hear it at night, you know. And I saw you. Dancing."

She wiggles her eyebrows at me.

I finish my beer and go for round two. Two turns into three. Four. Somewhere in the middle a dreamy warmth envelopes me like a blanket and I decide I don't want to ever crawl out again. I go for beer five. Everything bleeds together after that, one moment fraying into the next. I am on the porch, and then Johanna is driving and I am sprawled in the passenger seat as street lights flash overhead. I am laughing in a parking lot, clutching the car door for balance. There is a worn wooden counter underneath a glass I am holding. It tilts toward my face and I swallow. Low lights. Music. I am swaying in a crowd to a pop song I remember but can't name and I feel nothing. Not a blessed thing. Not the bodies around me. Not the coolness of the glass in my hand. I am incredibly, blissfully numb.

As I float from song to song my hips ride the swell and ebb of each beat. Hands close around them, and I try to flash away but find myself thoroughly anchored against another body. I think I know who it is. I let my head fall back against his shoulder and rock against him. Everything contracts together and I can't tell the difference between the breath on my neck or the yeasty flavor in my mouth, the pulse pounding away in my head or the blue and white lights dancing in my eyes. I close them and let myself be crushed into nothing but one body moving against another.

And then I am nowhere like a dancefloor, and those same hands are pushing my hips against rough brick. Something flutters warm and wet against my neck. Lips, I realize. I arch up and a soft plea escapes my mouth as something not entirely foreign blooms between my legs. My eyes drift open. I don't know where I am, and in the dim light the hair on the head that is drifting toward the neck of my shirt is the wrong shade of blonde.

"You're not-," I mumble. A rumble of a laugh vibrates against my chest.

"Did you think I was someone else?"

He pulls away.

"Well, now that we know who I'm not..." he says, punctuating his words with hot, open kisses against my jaw, "Who are you?"

"It's a secret," I mutter as my head falls back against the wall. I hear my name being called. Johanna has found me. She grabs my wrist and I mumble an apology.

"Don't be sorry," she barks.

Soft blackness creeps up around me, and the next thing I am aware of is my head bouncing against a car window, and silence so loud it fuzzes like a bad speaker in my ears. Then I am home, and Johanna is dropping me on my bed and telling me I am going to regret something.

I nod as my eyes slide shut. They don't open again until the door closes and I'm alone with my blood still roaring in my ears and a room too quiet to drown it out. I toe off one of my boots and my hands drift to the bottom of my shirt. As I tug it over my head my braid comes undone too, and it falls damp and cool against my back. Goosebumps prickle along my arms.

I had forgotten what it felt like, to be touched.

I run my fingers through my hair to shake it out, but end up running them down the column of my neck too. The mere ghost of a memory of lips against my pulse makes my breath catch in my throat. My other boot clatters suddenly to the floor and my fingers fumble to undo the button on my jeans. I shimmy out of them and as my thumbs run over my hips, I breathe in quick and sharp.

The last yellowing imprints of Gale's fingertips melted away long ago, but I can't remember the last time I actually enjoyed them digging into my skin. So when my hand sneaks between my legs, the whimper that escapes me is equal parts shock and pitiful relief. I've never needed like this before. But now it's all I can feel, burning hot under my skin, pulsing and aching between my legs as my fingers work clumsily toward something I'd only managed to achieve a handful of times, some of them only by accident.

My heart batters the inside of my chest and as I wonder which will give out first I remember the hands from before- how they felt closed around my hips- and they crowd everything else out of my head except for the crash of my own pulse and the quick, high breaths that sneak out of my mouth. A hand closes around my breast and I imagine it larger. Rougher. My fingers dive inside me and my spine arches. Please. Please.

I choke.

The world goes quiet and soft. I am lifted, floating, tense and shuddering, every inch of me straining. Then it's over. My spine melts into the mattress. My eyes flutter shut.

And then I realize what a horrible mistake I have made.

Those hands. Those lips.

They weren't Peeta's.

He was never there, just like he isn't here now.

The world comes crashing back, and as it does something I've been refusing to feel comes with it. A warbling keen escapes me. I rock into a tight ball, my nails digging into the flesh over my flinching heart. It hurts like it's been split down the middle- wide and deep and only getting worse with every beat.

I am alone. Desperately. Endlessly. Alone.

* * *

Anytime I've tried to pinpoint when, exactly, I made up my mind to leave Boulder, I come up blank. There was no crystallizing moment, no epiphany, no parting clouds or meaningful realizations. It happened just like a sneeze, involuntary and at the same time so undeniably necessary for my own survival.

All I have are the facts.

On Wednesday, February 5th, after a twelve hour shift waiting tables, I went to bed but couldn't get to sleep. Hours passed. I stared at my hand curled on the mattress and wondered how many nights it'd been since I'd truly slept. Even after Gale came into our room and the living room full of people grew quiet, I lay there staring at my hand, counting back the days to find where it had all gone so wrong.

When his body hit the mattress I tensed and shut my eyes. He exhaled heavily, then rolled over. His hand pried at my shoulder and I let him turn me onto my back. I felt his stare, his breath fanning across my cheeks. What was he thinking then? Surely not that this would be the last time he saw my face. He turned away suddenly and then lay still. When his breathing grew even, I stood up. Put my boots on. Shoved what I could into my bag. Walked without a backward glance out the door.

But I had no idea when I decided to do any of it.

Now I do. It's only the second thing I'm aware of the morning after Johanna gets me blackout drunk- the first being how wonderful the cold bathroom tiles feel under my knees as I heave pathetically into the toilet.

There was no 'moment' I decided to leave, and searching for one is not only useless, it's stupid. I was always going to do it. For better or worse, I am meant to be alone. Because I am built to survive. Because love is toxic to me. And because there is only so much I can take before I have to purge.

It's as foreign to my make-up as any chemical.

And that's all love is, afterall. A chemical.

I peel myself off the bathroom floor and get in my car.

There are things that need to be done if I'm to leave, and there's no time to waste with the weather being this unpredictable. I drive with my head rolling against the window, my eyes just barely focused on the road. It hardly matters that I am driving well under the speed limit though, because I don't see another car on the road the entire trip into town. It makes me nervous, but when I pull up to the auto repair shop their open sign flashes cheery orange in the window all the same.

I ask the mechanic how much it would be to look over my car, and I must look like cold shit because instead of giving me a price he tells me not to worry about it, and directs me toward the office where he tells me I can wait while he gets to work. But waiting is the last thing I want to do right now, especially with my stomach starting to pitch again, so I tell him I'll be back in an hour and walk to the diner.

The waitress brings me coffee and toast, and I put my head down on the table in between bites to ward off another spell of nausea. In the booth a few seats away from me, a couple is fighting. The man calls the woman he's with something horrible and I sink further into the vinyl covered seat cushion and move my cheek to a colder section of the table. I recognize her voice- musical and light, even when it's angry- and when I peek over the rim of my coffee cup I catch a glimpse of a halo of curls. I try to remember where I know them from but my thoughts keep scattering like bits of paper in the wind, so I give up and focus on finishing the plate of french fries I made the mistake of ordering.

It takes me much longer than an hour to head back to the car mechanic. I walk slowly along the side of the road with my eyes focused on the wet grass staining the front of my boots and try not to look up at any of the cars that pass. The reason is twofold- watching things move is making my stomach churn ominously, but also… someone might recognize me. If the cops are focusing their hunt here, any one of them could have seen a file with my face on it.

There were 'Missing' posters hung up in the bathroom of the diner. What if my face is hung up somewhere too?

It haunts me for the rest of the day. 'Have you seen this girl?' and my face below it, emblazoned on the billboards of city busses and the community boards of grocery stores from here to Boulder. People shaking their heads- 'No, but I'll keep my eyes out'. Others- 'Sure have, she was at the Safeway last weekend.'

'Grey eyes, dark hair, 'round five foot, maybe a hundred pounds?'

'Yep. She was wearing an old sweatshirt and all she bought was bologna and a box of oreos- damn strangest thing.'

By the time I get my car home I can hardly stand without swaying. I see neither hide nor hair of Johanna, but maybe that's just as well. I don't have the energy to hear boisterous retellings of last night's misadventures, or be made fun of, and I certainly don't want to know any more about what I did, or who it was that I danced with. Just thinking about it makes me feel like there are spiders under my skin. No. What I want is quiet. A place that's dark and small to curl up in. And, if it's not too much to ask, some sleep.

But I have time for none of that. I rest as long as I can and then I get up and pace. In the middle of the night I pack my car with non-essentials. Over the next few days I quietly erase any and all traces of myself.

To disappear is a strange act.

To stand in the scrubbed and bleached shell of your home and wonder if it's enough. To wonder how fully you've revoked your own existence.

Or what it is that you might not see, but could still betray you.

A hair. A forgotten mug on the porch, a stowaway sock that sought refuge under the stove, or a bobby pin that crept between the floorboards. There's so much we do that leaves a footprint of ourselves behind. Maybe that's what it means to be alive. To be somewhere- with all the mess and ruin that entails.

If that's the case then I have already died once. I can survive a second time. A third. As many times as it takes until I am finally somewhere I can call home. I don't know what it would take to find that place, or even how I'll keep it. But I know it's out there waiting for me, and that I have to keep going until I find it.

There's a feeling I remember. A sort of quiet stillness that starts in your head, then melts the rest of the way through you. The first time I felt it was when Prim and I were still young enough to be building blanket forts between kitchen chairs with Dad's old quilts. We were so careful with the fragile calico as we hung it over the back of the chairs, excruciatingly patient as we let it fall in a gentle sweep to the floor. It was part of it, I guess, that we were so reverent of them. It wouldn't have been the same without those quilts, the only thing our family had that was precious. We had nothing. Sometimes, not even food. But we had two generations of Everdeen women who saved and sewed and pricked their fingers, all so two little girls still young enough to believe a blanket had any hope of protecting them at all could find safety in the secret little kingdom underneath them.

Since then I've only felt it a handful of times, and only once since the fire.

Here. In my bed. With Peeta.

So on my last night, after I swaddle myself in my blanket and curl up on the barren mattress, I give myself a few final hours to remember the steady arms that held me, the gentle voice that eased wounds I was sure would never heal, and the boy who made me feel safe for the first time I could remember since my world went up in flames.

Because come morning, I would need to forget it all.

* * *

But nothing's ever so easy as waiting for night to end. I'd like to say that I slunk out of Estes Park to start the next chapter of my life clean and easy. I'd like to say that as I drove down the mountain and headed south, I was already beginning to realize that it was only ever a stop on a larger journey.

I'd like to say that I made it out and never ever looked back.

But that's not what happened.

Because while I was doing the desperate work of forgetting Peeta Mellark, he was making sure there was never any hope of that happening. As I lay my head down, fingers digging into a quilt that still- all these months and tumble dry cycles later- smelled faintly of must, Peeta was climbing into his truck. And it would have been somewhere around when a very few exhausted sobs wrenched themselves out of my chest that he was on his knees by a bed of wildflowers, picking them one by one. And it was just as I was finally falling to sleep that his knuckles connected with my front door, and my eyes flew open.

There's no other words for it but swept away. That's what he does. He stands there- hat in hand, tousled hair, breathless with excitement, and a smile blooming on his face that only grows when I scowl at him, and he tells me there's something he wants to show me.

"You'll love it," he promises. "It's beautiful. It's just- Well, you'll see. Wouldn't want to spoil your surprise."

He winks. Oh yes. That joke.

I am still wrapped in my blanket. My eyes are swollen. I smell like bleach.

"And… oh yeah," he says, the perfect blend of coy surprise and gentle humor- "Someone got these for you. It wasn't me though, I swear."

More flowers. I stare at them. I'm not a complete idiot. I know what it means when a boy brings you flowers. Especially twice. What I don't know is why. Why- why- why- But as my fingers close around the stems, I realize it doesn't matter. It never did. Peeta isn't mine to keep.

And that's how, even though I know it won't change a damn thing, I find myself walking through the heavy double-doors of the Thompson Planetarium, the flowers clutched at my stomach, and my blanket tucked under one of Peeta's arms. A Night Under the Stars. That's what the sign hung up across the doors reads, and I'm not sure what to expect when I walk into the large, carpeted room with a domed ceiling. The lights are dimmed as if we're at a movie theatre, and people are talking quietly and setting up blankets on the floor. Peeta motions for me to follow him to the very center of the room and I'm aware, for the first time, that all these people here are my age.

I trail behind him, picking my way through sprawling bodies, to where Peeta has spread his own blanket, and then my horrible quilt on top. He motions for me get on, but I take my time with taking off my boots. By the time I'm done, the lights are dimming even further, and Peeta urges me to hurry.

"You don't want to miss how it starts," he says.

I lie down cautiously, painfully aware of the tightness of the skin on my back. My head never makes it to the ground, though. Peeta extends one of his arms for me to use as a pillow instead. The room goes black suddenly, and a scattered applause breaks out that only grows louder as dreamy, soft rock floods the theatre. Stars burst in a kaleidoscope of color and light on the ceiling above us, and my heart stutters in my chest. Galaxies grow and explode into plains of stars and dust that melt away into blackness. New stars emerge- first just a splatter of light, then growing brighter until they take on distinctive shapes.

"I loved this when I was a kid," Peeta whispers. "I used to think... there was no reason to be lonely when there's this many stars in the sky."

I let his words sink into me and say nothing back. My head is too full of memories of nights and skies- the velvet black winter sky I arrived here under, the gray mists of the summer dusk, the wilder nights I spent out with Gale and his friends, the sunrises I've claimed for my own. And then I imagine Peeta, lonely and lost in his own head, staring up at those same skies, and my heart clenches hard.

I don't realize that I am staring at him until his head turns and he smiles.

"Hi," he says in a strange voice.

"If you could go anywhere in the world," I blurt out, "where would it be?"

He looks at me like nothing else exists and says- "Nowhere. I only want to be here. With you."

I see light bursting in my peripheral vision but I am not watching the stars' slow parade overhead. And neither is Peeta.

Our eyes are too busy with each other.

The world goes still and soft as he presses his lips to mine and his hand comes up to cradle my cheek. If I thought I knew anything at all about wanting before, it pales in comparison to what I feel now- an ache so sudden and tender it's to the point of pain. I whimper even, as his thumb brushes the ridge of my cheek. The worst part is, there's no going back. Now that I know what it's like to be kissed by Peeta Mellark, there's no doubt that I will spend the rest of my life trying to forget it. And I'll fail. Miserably.

So for a moment, all I can do is hang by a string underneath the palm of his hand and try to keep my frantic heart from bursting itself against my ribs. My eyelids sink down and blur wetly, and the last glimpse of him I have before they close entirely is the feathery brush of blonde eyelashes against his cheek.

Then I am up and stumbling away, tripping over the people blindly as I walk toward the red 'Exit' sign. I push through the door and burst into the cool, dark night, where the stars overhead are drowned out by the bright heads of streetlights that dot the parking lot. From here the sky seems blank and still- an unbroken, frozen sea of black.

But nothing else feels still at all- not even the earth under my feet. There are a thousand voices screaming in my head, but Gale's voice rises above them all. I am so tired of running from it. Of running from him. That's what I'm really doing here. I am eighteen. There is no parent I am obligated to come home to. There's only Gale, and what he'll do to me if he ever finds me.

I hear other voices, from the end of the parking lot, and I am moving towards them before I recognize what I am doing. It's the same couple that fought in the diner. I see the man- tall and dark-haired, wearing a grey hoodie. He is screaming at someone much smaller than him, louder and louder until I hear a heavy, dull thud and an eerie silence I know too well.

I am ten feet away. Five. I am behind him.

The person he's with… I know that head of curls. It's that girl who whistled at me the day I met Peeta. Rue. She is holding a hand to her eye, her face twisted in silent shock.

I grab the man's shoulder and turn him around.

As my fist connects with the side of his nose, I feel it, that thing that picked me up out of bed the night I left Gale. I never needed Johanna to reclaim it because it never left me. It's how I don't feel the fist that connects with the side of my ribs. The pain in my head as my skull cracks against the side of the car. It's the force that lifts my foot off the ground and rams my knee between the man's legs, then slams my interlocked hands over his head.

No more.

I'm done.

I am sick of being afraid. Of being in is a time when you have to turn around and deal with whatever is chasing you, and I am through with crawling like a worm from the bird.

As his body crumples to the ground, I think of my own. The scars etched in my flesh. The bruises it was given that have long since healed. The hands that have held it. Caressed it. Hit, gripped and invaded it. I think of the hands of the man who touched it while I was too drunk to say no, and then I think of the only hands that have ever soothed it, and awoken its want.

But it doesn't matter now. One way or the other, tonight would have always been the last time I'd ever feel them, and I'll just have to find a way pick up and move on. And I'll be ok. At least, that's what I tell myself as the cops posted as security load me into the back of their squad car.

I will always be ok.


	5. I'm Not Ok

**Trigger Warning: Suicide, child abuse, substance abuse, addiction, underage alcohol consumption, purging (ED).**

* * *

**Home is in Your Skin**

"Real or not real, I am on fire."

* * *

_**v.**_

_It's Tuesday._

_There's no place we're going. No place to be, in particular._

_It's me on Gale's lap up front, Thom at the wheel, Finn and Annika lost in their own world in the back seat and Warren, who no one really likes because he thinks he knows more than he does. I am high on whatever is in the air tonight as I lean out the car window, my laughter lost in the wind, eyes straining to stay open and loose hair, a whipping river of black, trailing behind us._

_We circle around and around, Thom speeding through red lights to get me to squeal and Gale growling at him not to be crazy, while Finn laughs at Warren's drunken attempts to explain how parallel universes work that the rest of us are ignoring._

_Gale holds my waist. Wraps his arms around me. I am woozy from it- his arms, his hands, his little promises in my ear as we turn corners too fast and I sway with no seatbelt on and grasp at the handle above the car door-_

_"Don't worry, I got ya'."_

_Then, his soft chuckle._

_Like I've done something impossibly endearing._

_My head is light and my heart hammers away in my chest. Silly me, of course Gale will be there to steady me. Still, the fulfillment of his promises are almost as sweet as the promises themselves, and I never grow tired of either. His hand presses against my stomach when we take a particularly sharp turn, and even though he's snapping at Thom to take it easy, his thumb is rubbing the bottom of my ribs, just very softly._

_That's when I'm sure that something is happening that I'm completely unprepared for._

_And I am right._

_Six months from now Gale will back me up against the grey slatted siding of a house I have been living in for less than a week. He will look at me with those dark, serious eyes, cup my cheeks with his big hands and say-_

_"You."_

_Then he'll shake his head as if I've done something wrong. "You, you, you."_

_"Me what?" I'll say._

_And he'll kiss me for the first time._

_But I won't be thinking about what his lips are like against mine (chapped) or the way he tastes (like smoke- like cigarettes and oranges). I am too busy remembering that Gale is all I have left in the world._

_I kiss him back._

* * *

I think I'm going to throw up.

The argument in the front of the police station has grown steadily louder since it started twenty minutes ago and my head throbs as the voices bouncing off the cement walls get more shrill. Please shut up. Please go away. Please let me just fucking die.

My leg bounces incessantly as I try not to think about where I am. If I do, I'm not sure I won't go completely insane. What happened in the parking lot replays in my head over and over. The dull shock of fist on cheekbone. The silence that followed. Then the fight, the flashing lights of the cop car, and Peeta appearing out of nowhere and tearing after Rue as she stumbled away. I bury my face in my hands and sink my head between my knees.

I should have never left my stupid cabin. I should have never answered my stupid door. I should have never come to stupid fucking Estes Park.

Or maybe I should have answered the stupid questions the cops asked me. But what was I supposed to say?

No Officer, I don't know who that guy was, I just started wailing on him.

No. Definitely better I exercise my right to remain silent. There was no way I could have lied about who I was- I'm a terrible actress, and there was a huge chance they either already knew or would figure out really quickly that I was lying. And it would have been that much worse when they figured out who I really was.

For the first time, I use the words.

Missing Person.

"Get up."

I jerk my head up and the room spins. The officer at the door to my cell doesn't look at me as his keys scrape and rattle in the lock.

"Turn around. Put your hands on the back of your neck."

I stumble to get up and do as he says as the bolt squeals and the door yawns open. I feel his hands on the backs of my legs, my hips, my arms...There's nothing I can do but bite my tongue as hard as I can until he says- "Alright. Let's go."

He walks me out of the cell and down the long narrow hallway they brought me in through, but instead of leading me to another cell he brings me to the front office. I pause in the doorway, unsure of whether or not to actually step through. Beyond the front counter, a small woman with close cut hair is staring unblinkingly at me. Her dark skin and fathomless eyes are defiant in the fluorescent light.

"_Miss._"

The officer behind me is glaring, and I stumble through the door. The woman tilts her chin up, her eyes never leaving my face as she adjusts the purse at her hip.

"Katniss," she says calmly. "It's time to go."

Good enough for me. I nod and hurry ahead without so much as a glance at the cop that brought me out of my cell. The woman waits until I am next to her to level a look I don't see at the cop at the front desk, and then we hurry outside. I take a steadying breath of fresh air, but it's too late. Hardly a few steps out of the police station I am throwing up on the sidewalk.

Fantastic.

The woman lifts my hair out of my face and tucks it into the neck of my shirt silently. Her hand comes to rest on the top of my back. She tsk's under her breath, which has the odd effect of calming me.

A napkin is thrust under my nose and I reach for it shakily.

"Thank you," I croak.

"This is far my first rodeo, sweetheart," she says matter of factly. Her purses jangles and the sound fuzzes in my still ringing ears. My head starts spinning again but I straighten up anyway in time to watch her eyes flit across my face, dark and impassive.

"Where do you live?" she says as her eyes flicker toward the parking lot and then back to me.

"I'm fine," I say. "I don't need a ride."

Her brows cinch together.

"Really. I'm fine."

"You don't have your car," she says, then presses her phone into my hand. "Call your parents."

I almost laugh. Instead, I sit down shakily on the edge of the curb and call Johanna.

"I'm at the police station," I say when she picks up.

"How'd that happen?" she mutters sleepily.

"Long story. Can you come pick me up?"

There's a rush of static as she sighs.

We don't have to wait long. For the first time ever I am grateful for Johanna's lead foot as her black SUV roars into the parking lot too fast and she has to jam on the brakes when she pulls up next to us. She eyes me and the woman and curls her fingers in a slight wave.

"Thank you," I say, "for everything."

The woman clears her throat.

"Take care of that bruise."

As I climb into Johanna's car, she eyes my face sternly.

"Who do I have to kill?"

I smirk.

"What makes you think I didn't already take care of it?"

"Because it looks like Peeta called in the cavalry for you. That was his mom back there, and I'm guessing she's the reason you're not in the drunk tank."

My head whips back around as we turn onto the service road but I'm too late to catch another glimpse of her.

"We gotta' talk about this, by the way. Everyone gets too drunk at least once, but twice in the same week can become nasty habit."

"I'm not drunk," I protest, but Johanna only hums half-heartedly.

"I'm not."

Johanna sighs.

"Katniss, you're a wreck. You've got a black eye, you threw up on the sidewalk outside of a police station, and you have bruise on the side of your face that's putting the fear of god into me."

I bite my bottom lip hard.

"I was nowhere near a bar."

"Then where the hell were you?"

"The planetarium."

It's quiet for a moment, and then Johanna is laughing so hard she's almost crying.

"There was a fight," I continue. "I didn't start it. Or. I don't know- will you stop? Listen. There was a fight and I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Who was fighting?"

I don't even consider bringing up Rue.

"Some couple. The guy-," I shake my head. My throat is catching and I don't know why. This whole night is just one disaster after another. "I think he hit her," I manage finally. Johanna's jaw works in the dim light from her dashboard and I fidget. I've gone from not saying enough to saying too much, but there's no backtracking now.

"I don't know," I mumble. "I couldn't just- You know."

Johanna nods. She's thinking of the night I got drunk, and I know because she looks over at me and looks back away quickly. That's what I like about Johanna. We have the same list of things we don't want to talk about.

"It was Rue and Marvel, wasn't it?"

I flounder for something to say, but my silence is as good as an answer for her.

She slams her hand on the steering wheel.

"Goddamn it! I knew it. I knew this was going to happen."

The rest of the ride home Johanna spends fuming, mumbling expletives and shaking her head, and it isn't until we're pulling into the long driveway up to our houses that she says something that catches my attention.

"Jesus Christ. Somebody better handcuff Peeta to a radiator."

I stare at her and she rolls her eyes.

"How far do you have your head up your own ass?! Peeta is Rue's brother, brainless. I'd be surprised if he doesn't kill Marvel with his bare hands."

It's probably not good that I can hardly keep my eyes closed. I'm still crackling with the electricity of the past twenty-four hours, twitching and restless as my gut turns over and over. Somewhere close to dawn I close my eyes and they stick long enough for me to wake up mid-morning to a house echoing with the sounds of the birds outside.

I stumble out of bed and into my boots, march out to my car and grab the bag of clothes from the backseat. I change fast, shrugging into my largest shirt and softest pants, and then I'm right back out the door and into my car.

Peeta's spoken before about where he lives, but I've never been there, and unlike him I don't have a slick little phone to guide me. I spend a few minutes driving around, but in the end his house isn't hard to find. And neither is he.

When I pull up the driveway of the ranch-styled house Peeta described, he's sitting on his front steps with his elbows on his knees, his nose pressed into his clasped hands. He hasn't changed out his clothes from last night- not even his shoes- and it doesn't look like he's slept either. He doesn't see me as I walk across the manicured lawn, but next to him Mutt's already climbing to his feet, his ears twitched forward and his hackles raised. Peeta looks up quickly, his red eyes darting from Mutt to me as his hands unclasp and land like dead weights to either side of him. Maybe coming here was a bad idea.

"Hey," he rasps. I watch his Adam's apple bob as he nervously pops his hat off.

"Hey."

Mutt chooses this moment to whine loudly and Peeta silences him by placing a hand on his head.

"Can I sit?" I say.

He waves lethargically at the spot next to him. I sit and draw my knees up to my chest, circling my arms around them and resting my chin on top. I'm not good at this- the comforting and the fixing that seemed to come so naturally to other people. People like Peeta. He deserves better, but he'll get me.

"How's Rue?"

His face hardens and he nods, his jaw working so furiously I can actually see the muscles in his face vibrating. But then I see something else too- shame. I think I have some idea where it's coming from, but he has to know that none of this is his fault. None of this is ever anyone's fault. His hand is suddenly at my cheek, brushing the hair back from my bruised temple, his eyes flashing between my face and an injury that I haven't seen myself, but am beginning to suspect is much worse than I thought.

"Jesus Christ, Katniss," he murmurs.

My heart squeezes tight. Don't you know Peeta? This is nothing.

These wounds may as well be fingerprints on glass. Still, there's something funny that happens to me whenever I am underneath his palm. I can't control the direction my thoughts go, and all at once I realize he might be right. The bump on the side of my head is throbbing and feels hot and tight, but underneath that...

I feel wrong.

Not my head. Not my organs. Not my bones. Something... else.

"I'm ok."

I have the fleeting image of something gigantic brushing my ankles in impenetrably black fathomless waters. I look at the toes of my boots over the tops of my knees, firmly planted on the bright new wood of Peeta's porch, and decide I never want to know what that feeling means. Not ever. Especially not now. But I can't seem to make myself brush his hand away.

"You didn't sleep," I say finally. "You need to."

His lips tighten and he nods again. It strikes me as so terribly wrong that he is this quiet.

"Where is she now?," I say.

"With Mom," he says. "They had a long talk last night."

Peeta sighs heavily and stares at his hands.

"I thought she was finished with him," he says. "She told me she-" He shakes his head. "I'm so sorry Katniss."

"I need to find a way to repay your mom for getting me out," I blurt.

Peeta looks up at me, scandalized.

"Are you kidding?"

"She stood up to an entire room of cops for me," I say. Cops are definitely not my favorite people. Maybe it's because I spent enough of my time shoplifting from 7-11, or because I knew all I would ever be to them is another runaway foster kid. Either way, I owe Peeta's mom big time.

"She's a lawyer. You kicked the crap out of someone who hit her daughter. Pretty sure that's a quid pro quo thing."

He smirks, but the joke's on him because I have no idea what that means.

"Marvel's not pressing charges, by the way. She took care of that too."

I didn't even think of that. Now I really need to find a way to pay her back. Something shows on my face- maybe I twitched- because Peeta's expression gets stormy again.

"He's a coward, Katniss. All he wanted was for his dad not to find out. You're safe."

I swallow hard. That feeling again, like there is something large and terrible just below my toes, is back. Now is not the fucking time.

"You need sleep," I mumble, and stand up suddenly. "Come on."

Peeta shrugs one shoulder and shakes his head.

"I'm not really-"

I put my hands on my hips and stare at him down my nose.

"Don't you bat those pretty eyes at me. Bed. Now."

His eyes get wide in a way that makes the skin on my face hot, but at least he stops arguing.

What Peeta neglected to mention is that he does not, in fact, live in the house, so when I bully him inside we only end up in the kitchen- all raw wood and gleaming brushed steel- while he bustles around making a-

"Midnight snack."

Mutt brushes past me and flops down in front of the stove.

"It's ten thirty in the morning."

He laughs as I glare from my position leaning up against the doorframe, my arms crossed tight around my chest. I'm not going to lie, Peeta's house is nice. No- more than nice. It's beautiful. I know his mom is a lawyer, and his dad is an architect of some kind, so obviously he was always going to live somewhere that was far and beyond anything I knew, but still. For the first time, I wonder what Peeta thinks of my little room, with my milk crate of clothes and the mess of tapes and old thrift store mugs scattered next to my bed. Because compared to this…

"Where are you going?" he says.

"Huh?"

"Sit down. You're making me nervous."

I hesitate.

"I feel like if I look away you'll disappear back out the front door. Sit down. Please."

He gestures at the chair closest to him. The moment I do he plunks a cup in front of me.

"What's this?" I say, eyeing the creamy liquid as it swirls lazily.

"Warm milk. With honey."

I take a sip. It's spiced too. I open my mouth to say something indignant about how he's the one who needs to sleep when he turns around, a tray of food tucked under one arm.

"Come on," he says.

Peeta was right, I hadn't planned on staying. He ducks back out the front door and I hurry after him, careful to keep the mug of milk in my hand from spilling. As I walk down the stairs, a little slips out anyway and I quickly lick the side of the mug to keep the liquid from dripping all over the porch.

"Good, right?," Peeta smirks as he watches my clumsy attempt to catch the drips. I get the feeling like Peeta is cheating at a game I didn't even know I was playing. I came here because I thought he would be upset, and here he is making me warm milk. I glare as he leads me around the side of the house. "It's my favorite thing to make on days like today."

"How often do you have days like-"

I stop short when I realize where he's leading me. He said he didn't live in the house, that he had a place out back. But he couldn't possibly mean-

"A school bus?," I say, unable to keep the skepticism from creeping into my voice.

"Hey," he sounds a little wounded. "Let she who does not live in an actual yurt cast the first stone."

Even though he's right, I still roll my eyes at him. A part of me is excited, though, to see what's inside. Peeta is amazing. He can fix anything you put in his hands, and sometimes he even knows something is broken long before you do. I can only imagine what he'd do given the chance. But Peeta noticeably won't meet my eyes as he balances the tray on one hip and slides the door open, gesturing for me to go in first.

I'm not disappointed at all.

It's just like Peeta to take something as ordinary as a school bus and turn it into something I could only dream of. It's not small or cramped like the school busses I remember from the group home. With all the seats removed and the wheel wells hollowed out it's spacious- airy even.

At the end of the bus is an enormous bed, encircled by a series of narrow, short shelves packed tight with books, paint stained jars of pens and paintbrushes, an old pair of sneakers, a few small trophies and a figurine of a woman in an astronaut helmet and mini skirt. A red alarm clock on the shelf above the bed ticks quietly- a real antique- and a slender, silver laptop sits neatly beside it.

In front of the bed is a narrow counter with a sink, a tiny square table with an electric kettle and a series of mugs hanging above it. Against the other wall is an overstuffed armchair and an old trunk with clothes thrown in heap on top.

"Sorry. It's a little messy," he says sheepishly as he climbs in behind me.

I snort.

"Do you need me to tuck you in?" I say as my eyes wander over to a window next to the bed, drawn there as if magnetized by the lush forest just beyond the glass.

"Wait. Your temple first."

"You-"

"Please Katniss."

I bite my lip. Why does he say things like that? I end up sitting on top of Peeta's little table while he breaks out a first aid kit. His fingers run through my hair as he brushes it back and I catch a hum in my throat before it escapes. What I can't stop, however, are the goosebumps that race down my arms. Once again, my long sleeves come in handy.

Peeta turns away from me and swings open a cabinet under the sink. Inside is a mini fridge where he pulls out a gel freezer-pack.

"This should do something about the swelling," he says.

"How'd you get so good at this?" I mumble as I press the ice pack against my gently bandaged temple. It throbs furiously as the cold bleeds through the sterile cotton, then numbs. Instead of answering, Peeta lifts me off the table. His hands flutter, as if he means to do something with them, but then he turns away quickly.

"Thank you," I say, unable to lift my eyes off my shoes.

Peeta turns back to me. He looks so serious that the raw ache I've been so good at pretending away bursts wide open again. As he opens his mouth I already know the words he's going to say, and I can't let him. I grab his hand and drag him to the bed.

"Come on," I say.

Peeta looks at me long and hard, then sighs heavily and shakes his head.

He tugs his shirt off over his head in one smooth movement, and my eyes fly to my knees. He strides over to the windows on either side of the bed and grunts as he slides them open. I look up when I hear him moving toward the front of the bus, and my breath catches in my chest. One of Peeta's shoulders is normal. The other is ringed with scars- one just above his collar bone, and another, nearly half an inch wide, stretches from his armpit to his back.

I dive forward and tug the laces on my boots, suddenly aware of all that I do, and do not, know about him. The fact that he looks nothing like the rest of his family. His hat, which he takes off everytime he sees me. The wildflowers. His hands, rough and clumsy and gentle all at once. My boots hit the ground one and then the other.

He lives separate from his family- why? And isn't he eighteen? Why isn't he in college?

The bed dips as he climbs in next to me. We eat what he brought over- cheese and fruit with crusty bakery bread and spiced milk. Its warm and heavy in my stomach, and I curl my legs up as my eyes get harder to keep open. Peeta puts the tray to the side when I finally stop picking at it and tugs a soft quilt off his shelf, settling it around both of us.

"You look tired," I say. He grunts as he lays back, then motions for me to do the same.

"I am, Katniss," he sighs.

"Then sleep."

His eyes fall shut and, in just a moment, his breath becomes soft and even. As it does, my stomach tightens. I want to feel it on my fingertips, my neck, my cheek- all the tender, honest places I fear. Just a few hours ago, on a bare mattress in a dark room, I was letting Peeta go. My car was packed. My teeth were grit. I could have left then. I should have left then.

Speckled morning light catches on the hard curve of his jaw and dances as the leaves outside sway and tremble. My eyes find the scar on his chin and my heart lurches. There's only one way he could have gotten it, and I can't stand to know if what I suspect is true. A long time ago, someone hurt Peeta. Badly.

And then they gave him away.

Near dusk, I gradually become aware of a few things.

I am curled up against Peeta's chest. He's sitting up, awake but very still except for the hand running over my head as his heartbeat murmurs in my ear. My own heart is galloping- as if I've been running- and my head is spinning with the oily remains of some horrible dream I can't rightly remember.

And Peeta is humming. Just very softly.

I don't know if that's what does it, but I do know that's the moment it happens. The enormous thing that was circling below me all day sinks its teeth into my ankle, and instead of pain, instead of fear, I feel...

Nothing.

I keep still for a long time, breathing in and out. Wisps of my dream come back to me. Smoke and screaming and Prim. The usual then. I try to focus on Peeta's hand. The feel of his chest rising and falling below my head. He shifts one of his legs and the quilt brushes the skin of my feet. It feels so soft, so incredibly luxurious, I scarcely dare to move.

And then I do. I tell him I need to leave. I promise I'll be back. I surprise even myself when kiss him. I should feel guilty, but all that's left of me is ash. I am rising out of myself as I slip out the door and into my car. The voices that leak out of my radio are like rain against a window. The teeth in my ankle sink in a little deeper.

I park my car in the Safeway parking lot. The sun is setting red and dark. I try to remember whether or not this means a storm is coming, but all I can think is 'Red sky in warning'. But that's not how the phrase goes, and I just give up. As I head inside, two girls in leather jackets watch me. I make the mistake of meeting their eyes as I pass through the pneumatic doors and into the produce section, where I lose all memory of my grocery list and stand staring at a pyramid of grapefruit for too long.

I walk back out of the doors with nothing.

"Hey."

It's one of the girls in leather jackets.

"Hi."

"You like Goatfuck?"

"Huh?"

"They're local. Playing tonight."

"It's our friends band," the other girl says. "Forgot to put flyers up. You should come though. They're good."

I nod.

"Maybe."

But maybe turns into yes when they invite me to hang out at one of their houses before the show. It smells like cigarettes inside. The sink is full of dishes and someone here hasn't had a shower in at least a week. Just like home. Someone puts a bottle in my hand. My first sip burns. I almost choke. And then I don't stop drinking until the faces and smells and the house we're in all blur together, and I don't think or remember anything. I just am and continue to be as we head to the show, as we stride in through a bar and walk purposefully to the back, where a door and a staircase lead down to somewhere dark and deep and loud.

Why am I here? The little voice in the back of my head is screaming in the strangest key. Lights flash. Bodies collide with mine. I let the bottle slide out of my fingers and it lands on the side of my foot. What am I doing? An elbow jams into my ribs as a wall of reverb from the speakers engulfs us all. But I feel no adrenaline as the bassist starts a gallop, no kick in my heart as the drummer picks up a d-beat- I don't even feel the need to move as the pit opens up all around me. I don't feel anything at all. Not even the head that cracks against the side of mine, narrowly missing my already bruised temple. I should be scared. Why am I not scared?

And that's when I see her. Madge Undersee. The girl whose face has been plastered all over this mountain for weeks. Has she been here all along? I swallow. Blink. She disappears. I twist my head around and around, desperately looking for a wisp of blonde, a flash of her too-big eyes, anything,anything.

But she's nowhere.

I shove my way out of the crowd. It feels like I'm floating, gliding over the rough cement floor littered with beer bottles and stamped out blunts, but I'm doing nothing like that. In fact, I'm stumbling, tripping over people's feet and up the stairs, through the bar, out the door and into the middle of the alley. And there she is all around me, staring from every wall- shocked and unsmiling for the camera. But how could she ever have known, in the moment that the photograph was taken, that it would be all the world would ever remember her for? I twist around, take off left and then left again through the back alleys. But Madge Undersee isn't here, and I begin to wonder if she was in that basement either.

I double over against a wall, knuckles digging into the rough brick. My pulse thunders a helter skelter rhythm in my head and I can't get my thoughts to stick to each other. They keep crumbling apart until I can't remember where I am and what I'm doing in the same moment. Why am I here? I don't know. I was looking for something, but it's not here and now I'm scared it never was.

I press my face against the brick and breath heavily as my teeth grind down so hard I can feel the pressure all the way at the top of my skull. Madge Undersee has been missing for months. Neither human being nor camera has seen her in all that perilous time. But people have been looking for her. What about me?

No one is looking for me.

I could disappear tomorrow and no one would ever know. Here- now- this could be the end of my story.

That's all folks! Curtains close.

I run my hands through my hair but midway through they tangle and fist.

And that's when a thought actually congeals in my brain. That this story could end in more ways than one tonight. That I could spend the rest of my life chasing something I'll never find in alleys and basements, always sure that all it will take to ease the keening ache in my chest is sitting neat and tidy at the bottom of a bottle.

I press my forehead against the cool, damp brick. It feels good on my overheated skin and wipes clear the cloudiness in my head. I take a deep breath. That also feels good. What doesn't feel good though, is the scrape of my fingernail against the back of my throat, and the burn of bile and alcohol as it rushes up and out of me to splatter on the ground.

But I don't do it to feel good.

I straighten my spine. Walk to the end of the alley on shaking legs. My head is still fuzzy.

I don't want to… but I do it again anyway.

This time when I heave it's whining and pathetic, but only spittle comes out. Again I straighten. I pick a line in the sidewalk and test myself out, watching my feet line up one in front of the other. Not yet. But closer.

To sweat it out, I make myself jog. My head throbs as I do, and the longer I run the worse it gets until all I can focus on is the impact of my boots against the pavement, one stride to the next. I keep going until I find my car, and then I kneel by the back wheel while on my hands and knees to try again. This time white hot pain explodes in my head so I let it hit the tarmac of the parking lot where it stays. For a moment, spots bloom at the edges of my vision until all I can see is the single dandelion poking its ragged head out of a crack in the cement underneath the tight hunch of my body.

I watch its petals flutter in the shadows until my eyes blur with tears as I force the rest of what's in my stomach out. Tomorrow can't be like today. Tomorrow can't be like any day that came before, because actually-

I think I might not be ok.

I think maybe I haven't been for a long time.

My eyes are heavy and I am so tired, but I make myself get up. The world spins around me and I grab onto the back of my car for support. Then I find another crack in the sidewalk and test myself. This time, I walk straight and true.

I get in my car and drive until I'm somewhere I've been many, many times before- the river I bathed in all those months back, raw and naked in the white snow. This morning the grass reaches my knees and the trees overhead are voluptuous shadows against the lightening sky. The river I hear before I ever see it though, abundant and rushing from the all the rain over the past few weeks.

My boots come off first. Then my socks. A chill to runs up my spine when I am barefoot in the gentle grass. When I've stripped completely, I step forward into the rushing water. It crashes at my ankles and my stomach tightens in fear. I tell it that it's too late. In the still darkness of early morning, I wade out to my knees. My thighs. The water swallows my hips greedily, engulfs my chest, my shoulders...

And then my feet are ripped out from under me and my head slips below the black current.

They are yelling at me to stop, but I race right past the men in giant yellow suits with red tanks on their backs. I am too small and too fast for them, and fly inside the inferno of Building Twelve without hesitation.

It's so hot the air screams against my skin as I run up the stairs, flames licking along the walls and in the windows of the steel doors to the apartments on the first floor. I don't stop though. I keep climbing. On the second floor I hear screams. At first I'm not sure what it is because it's so faint in a place that's roaring so loudly, but there's no mistaking it.

I keep going.

On the third story it gets hard to breath. Harder, I mean, than just with the heat. And there's something wrong with me- I can't get enough air. I can't make myself move any faster. But I don't stop. I won't. I force myself to move. Force myself to climb stair after stair, even when black speckles at the edges of my eyes. Even as my head starts to feel light and I fumble and trip. Even as I hear the something like thunder, but so much louder, on the floors above. Even as the building shakes, and the walls around me groan and the ceiling gives way.

It's strange how whether it's still or surging, it's always silent under water.

In the end, there was only one survivor of that fire. Me.

Mom. Dad. Prim. They were gone, but their names stayed in newspaper articles written by angry people who had the privilege of shaking their heads a safe distance from the smoking ruins. They said the contractors hired by the government paid someone off to say their buildings passed inspection. They said the contractors cut corners. That building Twelve was an accident waiting to happen. But no one is angry that Primrose Everdeen never graduated the third grade. No one is angry that Aster Everdeen had been clean for over a month. No one is angry that the morning before he died, Thomas Everdeen put both his hands on my shoulders and told me he'd see me when I came home later that afternoon.

Maybe that's the problem.

I have been trying to come home for years. But my home is gone, and all that's left of it is what I carry etched into the flesh of my back.

So... what am I doing here?

I'm trying to decide that, actually.

Trying to calculate what it would take for me to crawl out of this river. To wake up tomorrow, pull my boots on and keep going on as I always have been. Because part of me will never stop climbing those stairs. Part of me will never stop trying to find my way back to them. Even now. I was told the pain would fade with time. What a useless lie. I feel their absence every second of every day, even when I sleep. It's like a lead weight pressing on my chest that I can't escape, and- Oh God- I have tried, and through failing I have learned that some wounds never heal.

You can only learn to live with them. Until you can't.

You are so brave, Katniss.

Peeta said that. It's one of the things he whispered to me during the storm when he held me underneath my open window. My eyes were closed then, as his fingers ghosted over my cheeks, my eyes, the curve of my jaw. Gentle like sunlight, the trace of his skin on mine remained long after he was gone. Only now, in the crush and cold of the river, do I really appreciate what it was like, to be loved by Peeta.

He's wrong, though. There is nothing brave about me. One sunrise to the next, all I've done is bide my time, waiting endlessly in the space between stillness and breathing, the final flickering ember of a fire that's been burning for seven years. Out of the silence comes my father's voice. He is singing to me. I am so tired, but the notes catch in my throat. It works instinctively, uselessly to harmonize with him, and a bubble of air bursts out of my mouth only to be ripped away in the current.

I feel its loss like an organ has been torn out of me. And that's when it hits me. Mom, Dad, Prim. If I disappear, so will they.

I pull myself out of the river naked and gasping, mud all over my hands and knees. The sun is now fully risen, and beats down on the back of my neck as I hack out the water lodged in my lungs. When I'm finally able to climb to my feet, shaking and sticky, a man with red hair stumbles out of the brush. In his arms are my clothes and boots, and he gapes at me in complete disbelief as I stare back at him.

A moment passes where only the cicadas seem to have anything to say.

Then, without a word, I take my clothes from him, tug my boots on and turn around, completely conscious of the tight tug of scars that mottle my back as I pull my shirt over my head. Without even a glance behind me, I walk stiffly back through the trees.

Notes:

Special thanks to my incredible beta Opaque, and the unbelievable job she did with this chapter. 3


	6. Allergic to Thoughts of Mother Earth

_**Home is in Your Skin**_

"_Real or not real, I am on fire."_

* * *

_**vi.**_

Summer pulls back its lips to reveal winter's jagged teeth.

The mountain is naked and new come August, the wildflowers long gone and the grass disappearing nearly overnight. All that remains are the leaves: golden tones of orange and red that lick their way around barren valleys and jutting rocks. That and the dandelions, still yellow and not yet fragile in the least.

Each intrepid crown of gold has a net of white roots that catch my heart and squeeze. When my hiking tour groups trickle down to nothing, I walk the dry, cracked trails alone, surrounded by their bobbing heads. There is never enough hours for these wanderings, never enough sun in the newly chilled air, never enough trail behind me. I am a restless, tethered animal, pacing the mountain trails until I abandon them altogether, desperate for somewhere further than I was the day before.

That's how I find the hollow in front of Ladybird Lake- a place for my bones to lay while the rest of me floats away. It sits just below the crest of a hill, where a rock overhang hides a scalloped dent in the earth just big enough for two bodies.

I go there alone.

Burrow down in the hollow, rest my face against the dried grass and earth of its wall and stare out at the dark waters of the lake in front of me, the shadowed rise of the mountains just beyond, and the advancing battalion of clouds overhead. Hours pass where I am a tight ball of roots in a cradle of ashen soil, never able to fully plant myself. As the wind picks up and penetrates my jacket I am carried back to my cabin. I fill my stove with wood and light a fire in its belly, jam my headphones on and spin in the dark, the smell of cedar and burning newspaper curling around me as I move.

Eventually, Peeta comes to find me. I am moth and shadow to his light- fluttering ever closer, only to pull long and far away. Some nights I drag him to his feet and spin him around the room with me, my cassette player or his iPod shared between us as I breathe against his shoulder and he jokes about his lack of coordination and the way the rough skin on his hands catch on the back of my sweater. In the low, quivering light I sweat out the fever that drove me into the river. It rolls down the precipice of my spine, gathers behind my knees and dots the plain of my chest.

Other nights, I don't know what to do with Peeta at all, this boy who knows nothing and too much about me, but still finds his way to my side time after time. I don't know what to do with myself though either.

Those nights, we drive.

Peeta pulls his truck up to the very edge of Lake Colorado and kills his engine, and we watch the moon glittering on the black water until I am too tired to respond to anything he says with more than a mumble. His truck is old enough that, like my Volvo, it has a tape deck in the console. And wherever I can play music, I do.

It shouldn't surprise me when one night I discover half of my collection of tapes have migrated to his car, but it does. There are so many of them he's started sticking them in a box near my feet, where they multiply unchecked like bacteria in a petri dish. Two becomes ten, which doubles and then some, and soon I am back to raiding Goodwill for new material. Peeta bravely grants me unconditional control of the radio, and he never complains when we listen to the albums that are clearly my favorites over and over again.

The best nights by far are the ones where he drags me to Estes Park's small family-owned theatre for reruns of corny old sci-fi movies. Naturally, he knows the family who owns it (and everyone who works there to boot) so popcorn and drinks are always free. We never leave without Peeta getting a full run down of the schedule for future events, and I try my best to camouflage myself against the strangely funeral parlor-like wine colored wallpaper. I still don't know many people here, and it's easier to feel like a stranger in a strange land than admit that I am unable to put down roots. In spite of my best efforts, the people who greet Peeta and I at the theatre have already 'heard so much about me'. In a place this small I shouldn't have expected any different, but I am still surprised that I've been noticed at all.

Worst of all is how their eyes bounce between Peeta and I- back and forth, as if we are answering a hundred unspoken questions every minute we stand there discussing the future showing of the 'Fifty Foot Woman'. What is it that they are so curious about? And what do they think they know? I am terrified to be the subject of someone's discussion. Every word uttered about me drags me closer to the inevitable point where I must confront the question of what the _hell_ it is I am doing here.

Because while I know 'I don't know' won't be a good enough answer, it's all I've got.

I have been playing hide and seek out here for months, wild-haired and breathless as I tried to outrun footsteps I swore were just behind me. Now I understand that they were all in my mind, and Gale had finished with me long ago- maybe even the moment I walked out the door. Maybe he knew, even then, what I was capable of. If that's the case, then I must accept that I have no hope of being forgiven. Then again, that was true long before Gale.

And the ghosts that scream inside my head are all the proof I need.

The truth is, Peeta was wrong.

I am no girl. I am another beast entirely: something burnt and broken and wingless- restlessly pacing a mountain as if it were ever mine to own. Now that mountain is molting, stripping itself to bare stone and earth, a little wilder and stranger than it was the day before. To survive, I must answer this change with one of my own.

In the darkness of the theatre, I lift the armrest that separates me from Peeta. On the screen a woman with perfectly coiffed hair smokes a cigarette in a dimly lit room, and we are meant to wonder if she is really as human as she seems. The warmth that radiates from Peeta is a force all its own, as undeniable as that suffocating ache I carry in my chest. I put my head gently against his shoulder. It is an instinct I only dare follow in the dark, where all eyes are focused on the screen, and any unsteady exhalation will be swallowed by the distant clatter of the projector.

* * *

"_You lookin' for something sweet?"_

"_Medium strawberry, whip-cream."_

"_Come on now," Finnick says, his eyes sparkling as he leans across the counter on his elbows. His red striped paper hat slips slightly to the side as he puts his face on his hand. "What's with that look?"_

"_What look?"_

"_That stony, angry 'fuck the world and everything in it' one?," he asks, a smirk pulling at his lips._

"_It's my 'get me ice cream' look," I say, and push my bottom lip in a mocking imitation of a pout._

"_And here I was thinkin' big girls didn't cry."_

_He leers and reaches out quickly to tug on the end of my braid. I snatch it out of his grasp, but not before the back of my neck prickles. Gale does that all the time. I __**hate**_ _it. And the way Finnick's eyes gleam at me… He knows. My face is suddenly hot, but he gets like this whenever Annie disappears for more than a day._

"_Correction. It's my 'do your damn job' look."_

_The grin melts off his face and he straightens up, adjusting his hat and thumping the handle of the scoop with his palm. It spins midair, then lands handle first in his hand as he lifts the lid off the freezer. It takes him all of a few seconds to scoop the ice cream, toss that up into the air, spin, grab a bowl from the stack sitting next to the freezer and catch the ice cream in it. Behind me, I hear the kids at table five shrieking in delight. The corner of Finnick's lip twitches as his eyes catch on mine once again. He tugs the whipped cream nozzle out and spins the bowl on the counter as he piles it on, topping it off with a red gummy bear._

_He puts the bowl on the top counter with a smirk and a salute over my shoulder at table five. I reach for the sundae. Behind us I can hear kids asking parents if they saw his performance. I know without turning back that the little girl with big, watery eyes at table fourteen has watched the whole thing and will be breathlessly wondering if her mother will let her order one too. It's part of the reason Sae, the owner of the diner, lets Finnick operate the ice cream counter. No one can upsell quite like he can._

"_Medium berries in cream," Finnick says as puts he balances the handle of his scoop on his forehead. "For the young lady who's all grown up and…"_

_He moves his hands away, his eyes trained up. The scoop stands straight._

"_... knows __**exactly**_ _what she wants."_

"_Mom! Mom! Look! He put the scoop on his head and it's staying!," a little voice says, and I know it's the girl with big eyes. My insides turn to lead. She sounds like Prim. _

_He spreads his arms out wide, lifting them higher every moment the scoop stays balanced. Applause breaks out in the tiny diner, first one table, then growing louder the longer Finnick stays in position. I hear the line-cook whoop and Finnick smiles suddenly. The expression wrinkles his forehead and the scoop clatters to the floor. But the diner is roaring anyway, and Finnick's grin is so wide that it's fit to crack his face in half as he retrieves the scoop and bows._

_When the door is locked that night, I take a moment to stare into the darkness outside. Because it's so bright inside, it's endlessly black out there- a lightless ocean that promises cool, fresh air if only I could make it beyond the glass. I let my eyes unfocus. There are tables to wipe and a floor to wash, registers to count and table settings to make, but I can't seem to get my bones to move._

_I look at my reflection and try to see myself._

_Big, dark eyes stare back at me. A girl in patched black jeans with wild hair._

_I have no idea who she is._

* * *

"Shh-"

"Johanna- stop- I'm not going to-"

"Put on your big girl pants and just-"

"_...Hello?"_

Johanna frantically motions at me to start, her cheshire cat grin only growing when I roll my eyes.

"Fine," I mouth. But one corner of my lips ticks up as I sing-

"_Happy Birthday to you- You live in a zoo- You smell like a monkey- You look like one too."_

Johanna throws her hands up, but Peeta's laughter- genuine and surprised- is all I care about anyway. I spin Johanna's office chair around, away from her and her computer and the schedule on her desk so I can stare at the toes of my boots.

"Katniss? Is that you?"

"Yep."

"What number is this?"

"Mine. Johanna made me get a phone."

"I got it _for_ you," Johanna corrects. I hear her shuffling around and the snick and roll of her porch door as it slides open. "And it's for work purposes only!"

Her boots echo on the porch as she stomps down the stairs.

"I guess this means I can text you anytime I want now," he says.

"I said I had a phone, not that I was going to answer it."

As he laughs I continue to spin in Johanna's office chair, grinning at the floorboards as they blur underneath my feet. A soft kind of heat shivers in my stomach. Too much coffee. I take another sip from the paper cup in my hand anyway. With all the sugar Starbucks put in it I can hardly taste anything else, but I haven't learned how to say no to Johanna and have it stick.

"It _is_ my birthday though," Peeta points out. "And you know the rules about birthdays."

"I get to punch you for every year you've been alive, right?"

"Well. You could. But that would defeat the purpose of the whole '_be nice to the birthday boy'_ thing."

"Someone's obviously been lying to you about the point of birthdays."

He laughs again, softly this time, before clearing his throat. My heart sinks.

"You know. I think, as generous as your offer of punches is, I'd settle for you just coming to the party we're having. My family, I mean. It's nothing big."

I tuck the phone between my cheek and shoulder so I can rub my hands on my jeaned thighs, my eyes locked on the tiny dots of mud splattered on the fabric.

"It's _your_ birthday," I mumble distractedly as I scratch some of the mud flecks off.

"It wouldn't be the same without you."

It takes me too long to put together an answer to that, but Peeta fills in silence so quickly I never stood a chance anyway.

"Nothing fancy," he argues. "Just come, eat some cake, hang out… You know. Normal friend stuff."

Is that what we are? Friends? There is a breathless swooping in my stomach, like I'm somewhere between having slipped on ice and the bone-rattling shock of hitting the ground. But I have just relearned to walk on solid ground after a little swim in a river, and my knees have felt a bit weak lately. Still, I nearly choke on the- "Sure," I offer up as a response.

I hear a rush of static, and then Peeta's voice, a little breathless-

"Cool. _Cool._ Alright. See you around eight?"

"Sure."

By the time Johanna bursts back inside I have already decided to hate my new phone.

"It's too damn windy here," she says. I bite the nail of my thumb and watch as she hustles around the small office packing a plain black purse with a file folder and a leather portfolio. "Alright. I'll be back. Don't forget to look through that blog before you leave."

I hum around my nail, already plotting my escape route back to Ladybird Lake. She hurries to the door but catches her hip on the desk.

"Son of a-"

She keeps going though, and the door snaps shut behind her, catching the expletive as it falls from her lips. I wait to hear her monster of an SUV roar off before I follow her out the door. For a week now she's been talking about meeting the person behind HomeSuisHome, a blog about miniature houses with a rabid following. Johanna tried showing it to me this morning over coffee, and while I did my girl scout's best to look interested, all I've thought about all day is going back to the hollow.

My phone gets dropped off in my cabin before I head out. It's replaced in my bag by what I shrug and call lunch- two pickles, a slice of bologna and hunk of cheddar cheese. Instead of slipping a thermos of tea into my pack too, I drink it on the way, soothed by its warmth in my hand and the fragrant bursts of steam that rush against my cheeks and nose. It's cooler today than previous days- summer is gone, and even though we've scarcely begun fall, the very absence of heat has turned the air bitter. It threatens to be a frigid winter- much worse than last year.

_Last year._

Soon, I will have been here for a year.

The thought settles tight and sick in my stomach, and sticks to my ribs long after I reach the hollow and curl myself into an exhausted ball. There was never really a plan when I left Boulder, just a vague outline of an idea to get as far away as I could, as fast as possible. In a year's time, I've gone maybe fifty miles. There were so many places I could have ended up- San Francisco, New York City, Chicago… Yet somehow, I stalled out here for no good reason I can remember. It just happened- and all of my best intentions I had of leaving this place blew away with the wind.

I tuck myself tighter and let my eyes slide shut. Every memory I try to push out of my head burrows into me with tiny little teeth and no matter how I pull they stay latched on. Minutes turn into an hour, maybe more, that I breathe slow and deep while I try for the thousandth time to make some kind of sense out of how I ended up here. But the longer I think, the sicker I feel, and eventually I have to give up.

The air pulls strands of my hair out of my braid. They whisper against my cheeks and my tightened jaw, something I might have mistaken for motherly, once.

But I know it's just wind.

I know that I am alone. I have been for too long to try to make something out of nothing. And anyway, I am too tired to cry.

* * *

_Annie is gone for three days._

_This time when they finally find her it's under a bridge, her elbows bulging out of the stalks of her arms like sallow tulip bulbs. At work, Finnick's stare went right through the walls of the diner to somewhere miles away from here. Without knowing how or why, I understood that when he walked out the door that night, I would never see him again._

_I am right._

_For days afterward I am rattling with an empty energy I can't seem to shake. Every night when we close, I lock the doors and wonder who will lock them after me. There's a radio that sits behind the ice cream counter. I bring it out and turn it on, blaring music as high as Sae can stand, which, considering she's half deaf, is probably far too loud. I bounce on my toes, bobbing my head and mouthing the words to the songs I know while I turn chairs upside down and stack them on tables or mop splatters of ketchup and coffee off the floor._

_Finnick once told me he needed to know where an ocean was at all times or he would get lost. In Boulder he was separated from an ocean on either side by a mountain range and a few hundred miles- as hopelessly landlocked as the rest of us. The ocean used to terrify me: this big dark thing that tongued the edge of our coastlines with promises of hurricanes, fifty-foot waves and dark, inescapable silences. But the way Finnick talked about it, I half-way loved it too._

_That's how I know where he's gone- back to Nantucket, his ocean, his beach, his home- and he took Annie too._

_To the only place he knows is safe._

* * *

The walk back takes me too long, and I sulk in the steaming spray of the shower until I'm numb and pink. Every minute I take getting ready for Peeta's party makes me less excited to go, but eventually I can't glare at the clock any longer and I have to drag myself into the car if I want to get there at a respectable time. Even so, I take an extra minute after I pull up and kill my engine to put my forehead down on the steering wheel and sigh.

My plan is to get in, say hi, avoid everyone, then get out. But as my eyes drift to the bright windows of Peeta's house, which are densely forested with the shadows of guests, I realize that'll be easier said than done. I've never been very good with people, and I've never had many friends. There's Gale, of course. We were friends. Before. But what does it say about me that I've only ever been close to one person, and I couldn't even do that right?

When I manage to finally drag myself inside, a wall of voices and smells hit me. Apparently Peeta has no idea what a small family party is. Small family parties are me, Prim and Mom all gathered around our tiny kitchen table with one of Betty Crocker's finest and a tall glass of cold milk apiece. Only if we were very, very lucky, would Dad have enough time off from work to be there too. That was the last birthday party I had. I had just turned eight.

This year I forgot about it entirely.

I make a beeline for the drinks lined up on the kitchen table, bypassing the alcohol with a sick twist in my stomach and grabbing a red Solo cup of Coke instead. If I thought Peeta's house was beautiful before, it's nothing compared to what it looks like now, cheerily lit and scrubbed to a shine. Someone decorated too- garlands of golden lights and dark leaves twine around bronze-painted boughs that hang over the kitchen table, and fragrant little tealights dot every surface.

Even the other guests look nice. Some of them I recognize from around town and some of them must be friends of Peeta's parents. It's nothing like the other birthday parties I'm used to either- held in moldering basements where the music played loud and fast and every dark face melted into the next. I take a quick gulp and spy Peeta over the top of my cup. He's in the living room talking to Rue and hasn't spotted me yet so I quickly turn around. As I do his eyes flicker up. _Shit._

Why did I ever agree to this?

Peeta pushes his way through the crowd in the kitchen towards me, and there is an awkward moment where I think he means to hug me. Instead he runs a hand through his hair and the absence of his usual baseball hat catches me off guard. Peeta never dresses badly- jeans and a t-shirt with either a pair of well worn Converse or his work boots, and his ever-present Rockie's cap. But it's so obvious that he dressed nicely for the party, even though he's still only wearing jeans and a grey plaid button up.

"Hey," he says with a lopsided grin. "You look nice. Your dress is… it's really nice. I like it."

Oh. The dress.

It's one of my Goodwill finds. I didn't even try it on until I was home and had already ripped the tags off. The color is what first caught my eye, a red so vibrant and deep I saw it from across the store, even squeezed between a black velvet dress from the 80's and denim housecoat. The fabric is beautiful though too: soft and loose, thick enough to be practical for colder temperatures while still silken against my skin. When I finally went to try it on, the inside of the neck had a tag with a name I recognized, though I hardly know what to with that information besides feeling a bit of shame for having to wear it with my dusty boots.

"Thanks," I say, and smooth the fabric over my thighs.

"Have you eaten yet? There's so much food, there's no way we'll be able to finish it later. Please, _god,_ you have to help us."

He laughs a little at that, but he isn't lying- the table is packed with more food than I've ever seen in one place except the boarding house cafeteria. I take one of everything, my plate piled high with more mashed potatoes and chicken than any person had a right to be eating. Peeta raises his eyebrows and chuckles, both of which I ignore as I sashay back through the crowd toward the kitchen, where I hope a space at a counter or the table has opened up.

"Woah there," he says. A warm pressure comes to rest between my shoulder blades. "This way."

He guides me down the hall to a sprawling room at the back of the house with windows that tower from floor to ceiling. It's much quieter here- there's only a smattering of guests, and most of them seem intent on their own whispered conversations. The only light comes from the low flames in the pale stone fireplace and the last fragile blue-gold slice of sunset behind the dark spires of the forest outside. I'm frozen in the doorway staring at it for just long enough that Peeta descends the stairs into the room and offers his hand to me. I take it instinctively as I step down, too stupefied by the view from the windows to pay much attention to anything else. It's good that Peeta is so used to beautiful things because I would have stood there in the doorway for as long as that sun held itself in the sky.

The noise of the party echoes from down the hall- laughter, voices and the clattering chime of silverware against porcelain- but it all fades out as Peeta and I sink onto a couch in front of the fire. He's only too happy to keep me company while I stuff myself full of some of the best food I've ever tasted, and even manages to hold back from teasing me so hard mashed potatoes come out my nose, though he does threaten. I'm not an one easy to make laugh, but Peeta just has a way of saying something that makes me snort at the worst times.

By the time I've finished eating I've slipped my boots off and my feet are tucked under me. Somewhere along the line the sun melted into a dark smudge of opaline light and then faded away altogether, leaving the sky outside a black canvas splattered with pinprick stars. I know I should feel guilty for stealing Peeta away from his own birthday party, but I don't. It feels so good to be here- _just like this_\- with him, that I can't bring myself to care. Especially when we sneak back into the other room for more food- cookies for me, coffee for him- and breathlessly flop back on the couch. While we were gone someone stoked the fire and it blazes so brightly it's almost like I've walked into another room altogether, warmer and drowsier than the one before. The problem is now it's so bright that the room is reflected in those huge windows, and before I can look away I've caught my own face staring back at me.

It's the same girl I saw in the diner window. She's thinner- her cheekbones high and sharp, her eyes larger and _so round_\- but there's no doubt that she's the same. Is she shocked to see me? It's been a long time since that first night. I've seen my reflection since then, of course, but never with the intention of _seeing._

And now here I am, intention be damned, staring at the girl who is supposed to be me. Only... I don't see me.

I look too much like my father for that.

My eyes skate away and catch on a dark shadow standing in the doorway behind us- a tall man with dark hair in an untucked white button up shirt. I don't know if he sees me seeing him, but he's watching both Peeta and I. Heat prickles along my neck.

"Peeta," the man says. "It's time for cake." The shadow shuffles off and Peeta sighs.

"Shall we?"

But back in the kitchen, with a chorus of voices all singing to Peeta, the question that haunted me earlier today is back and the smile pinned to my face becomes a weight I almost can't bear.

_How did I get here?_

The answer, as it turns out, is something I've known all along.

Home. I am trying to go home. And I've been lost for a long, long time. Far longer than I've been in Estes Park, actually. That girl who stares back at me from windows and mirrors, she's just as lost. We're wandering together, our trails only brushing one another's when there's something reflective between us.

Peeta's eyes stay trained on the lit candles of his cake as he blows them out. The room is plunged into darkness with a gust of cheers and applause, and as the crush of that happy chaos closes over my head, I crumple. I think there is something broken inside me. I don't know how to want to live. Survival I can do. I can breathe from one minute to the next. I can eat food when I need to. I can make myself sweat and sleep and dance.

But what I can't do is make myself want to _live._

Maybe I wanted to get caught here. For all my big plans of bright, new cities, I drove maybe an hour away from Boulder and called it quits. I couldn't have reasonably thought I'd be safe here. I couldn't have thought Gale wouldn't know how to track me down, if he wanted to. What _was_ I thinking?

As the lights flicker on I slip out the front door and onto the porch, gripping the railing with shaking hands.

"Easy there, sweetheart. You ok?"

It's the shadow. In the porchlight his skin is yellowish and his eyes are red and puffy, but underneath all that, his stare is sharp and watchful.

"Yeah," I say. "I don't like crowds."

"Claustrophobic? Me too. I'll wander back in for cake when everyone else gets a piece."

I nod and put my head in my hands.

"You made a big impression on him, you know."

"On who?"

The man smiles.

"You have no idea, do you? Well. It's his story to tell. One day."

Oh. _Oh._ I am talking to Peeta's dad, and even though I've never met him before in my life, he seems to already know a lot about me.

"I'll just say one thing. Kid's got a good heart. Too good, really. Always been that way. Even coming out of where he did, as long as I've known him, he's always been good."

I nod. I know. I know he's good. _Impossibly_ good. I don't need to be reminded. Because as good as Peeta is, I am that wrong, maybe even more so. And I know what Peeta's dad is saying. That I am not good enough for him.

He claps me on the shoulder.

"If I know anything about that kid, he'll be looking for ya."

He wanders inside, the brief opening of the door leaking noise and light all over the porch. My brows stitch together as I stand in the cool air. Maybe I'm not good like Peeta is...

But at least I've never pretended anything different.

I am just what I am- what I've had to be, in order to survive. Troublemaker, fighter, and now wild and strange. But first and foremost, I am a survivor- whatever that means. Nothing good, certainly. But here.

_And alive._

A shadow slips past me, lithe and quick, but even in the dark there's no disguising those curls. It's Rue, and as she bolts down the porch steps and off down the long driveway, and I see something glint in her hand. _Keys._

I tear after her.


	7. Sinnerman

**Home is in Your Skin**

"Real or not real, I am on fire."

* * *

_**vii.**_

_The impact of my boots hitting the gravel of the driveway echoes like a gunshot in the darkness. Rue startles mid-stride, her head jerking back around as she trips over her feet._

_"God! Katniss," she says as she blows hair out of her face. She gives me an uncertain smile I make no effort to return._

_There is a full minute of silence where she stares at me and I stare right on back, even when her phone buzzes in her pocket. Instead of reaching for it she closes her skinny arms around her chest, her shoulders lifting and tightening as she looks toward the road that leads out of Peeta's cozy neighborhood to the highways beyond. In the distance cars buzz faintly by, their headlights obscured by winding runs of forest tucked around the rows of houses._

_"I like your dress," she says as she turns back around. She clears her throat uncertainly. "You know Peeta was really worried you weren't gonna come."_

_"Sorry. Work ran late."_

_She shrugs, then shakes her head and laughs._

_"It's not a big deal. He always finds something to worry about."_

_Her phone buzzes again and her smile gets stiff. She clears her throat again._

_"You two aren't…"_

_I stare blankly at her._

_"You know."_

_"No. No. We're not... like that."_

_I wave my hands in an erratic pattern and wonder if it looks as wooden as I feel. Sure, we kissed. But then Peeta said friends. So ok, we're friends. It doesn't matter. I don't need him. I shouldn't want him. Haven't I learned my lesson yet?_

_Rue's phone won't stop ringing now, and finally she swallows and tears it out of her pocket with fumbling fingers. I wish I didn't know what was happening. I wish it wasn't happening. Not again, and not to Rue, who is so like what I imagine Prim would have become, if she were still alive._

_She doesn't answer it._

_"I have to go," she says._

_"Don't. Rue-"_

_She backs up slowly, her head shaking from side to side._

_"Wait-!"_

_She doesn't._

* * *

The roads in Estes Park wrap tight around the mountains in perilously twisting ribbons. Until tonight, I haven't dared to go faster than the speed limit. But what else is there to do but chase her? We drive for twenty minutes. Thirty. An hour. I lose her twice, then find her again when her headlights cut back on and slice through the trees. My phone rings three or four times, and each time I'm so shocked I almost swerve into a guardrail. I don't bother to look at who is trying to find me, because I'm pretty sure I already know.

It's well past midnight when Rue veers suddenly to the shoulder of an overlook and her lights cut out. I follow, throwing my emergency brake into gear. It squeals to the kind of shuddering stop I know I should be worried about, but it just doesn't register that I burned through my break pads. The cabin light from Rue's car blares in the thick mountain darkness up ahead, and without a second thought about the singe of burnt rubber in my nostrils, I scramble to her door.

I find Rue with her head tilted forward resting on the top of the steering wheel, her arms wrapped around herself and her fingers digging into her back. I wrench the door open and kneel down next to her.

"FUCK!" she screams and pounds her feet into the floor by the pedals. "GOD DAMN IT!"

And then her little frame is heaving as she sobs. I kneel down next to her and hug her as best as I can. My heart clenches as she grits her teeth and draws a hissing, sharp breath that does nothing at all to steady her.

The funny thing about the darkness on these mountains is that it swallows everything- screams included. Nights here feel endless, like you're floating just below the velveteen surface of a black ocean, and no matter how hard you swim you're still sinking deeper and deeper with each passing moment. It's maddening, to feel that lost. To be so incapable of imagining daybreak even when you're within a breath's distance of it.

I had already left Gale twice before I was ever serious about it. It never stuck. I never expected this to last, and even now that it has, I wonder what it would be like to be back in his bed, our shitty apartment, tucked between the hands that, for better or worse, I knew would always be there. To hold me, or hurt me, or the unspeakable combination of both that left me cold and flinching on the filthy tiles of our shower floor.

And that's when I remember what it was like to believe that no shower could wash the sticky sheen of misery and guilt off my skin. Everything that put me in my car that night comes crashing back to me- the fights, the pain, the misery we shared like a flask of something sharp enough to numb, and hot enough to pretend it would burn us clean.

So that's how I know Rue will keep going back to Marvel. The ugliest truth of all is that a monster is still a monster- even if you love it.

But that doesn't mean it won't swallow you- completely, utterly, helplessly- Because even though you know you can't stay, leaving…

Leaving is hell.

And that's why the first time never sticks. The second doesn't either. But if I can make Rue wait; if I can get her through one more night, then maybe it will make the next one seem that much less impossible. If she's lucky she'll get to take it day by day. Wake up, pick herself out of bed and try to do something with the daylight before it's all gone. If she isn't… Minute to minute. Second by second. What I know now is that these moments are stitches of time. One by one, they stack. They build. And if you can be patient, they weave themselves into a fabric of small victories.

It has been three days where I have eaten at least once a day. Five days of remembering how to love the sun on my skin. A week since I last cried.

I'm not sure it was love I was recovering from. I'm not sure that it wasn't. Maybe it was Gale, in particular, that brought whatever it was out in me. It's horrible and completely unfair to compare them, but it feels nothing at all like what I feel when I'm with Peeta. Nothing at all like the confused stutter my heart makes at his smile, or the complete stillness I feel waking up next to him. Nothing about what I feel for Peeta is like what I felt for Gale, except for the fear that he will take something from me that I could never afford to replace.

"You're going to survive this," I tell her fiercely.

"How?" she chokes. "How can anyone possibly-"

"You do. You just do. Day after day. You just live. And then one day, you're not just living anymore."

I surprise myself with this, because I don't have any way of knowing if it's true. A tiny voice I've ignored until now insists that it is, but I'm still not so sure.

"It won't always be like this," I say. "It's like this now, but-"

I swallow and whatever it was that I was going to say sticks in the back of my throat. I settle for-

"It gets easier."

I don't know how long we stay there on the side of the highway like that. One hour. Maybe two. It's still dark when Rue grows quiet, breathing soft and deep in my arms. I leave her to grab my phone from my car and am unsurprised to find three messages and seventeen missed calls from Peeta.

_'Hey- did you guys leave?'_

_'Katniss is Rue with you?'_

_'Katniss please answer me'_

I chew my thumb and stare at a truck as it rumbles by. It's the first sign of life I've seen so far besides Rue and I, so dawn can't be far away.

_'On our way back. We're ok.'_

I hesitate before hitting send, watching the cursor blink at the end of my message. The words feel weird, like they've crumbled into their separate, meaningless parts and I can't figure out how to put them all back together again. I wipe my eyes and hit send, then jam my phone into my coat pocket. I don't have time for this shit.

There's no need to inspect my car. The brake pads are shot and I know it. I awkwardly pull Rue out of the driver's seat of her car and help her over to the passengers side, where she immediately gathers her legs underneath her and curls up like a little cat. Before I shut the door, I tug my jacket off and put it over her shoulders. Under the heavy black leather, her eyes flutter but she doesn't stir.

I drive us back in her car with my window cracked. The frigid air stings my tight cheeks and burns my eyes, but it feels good in the way that even the smallest reminder of survival can. Instead of sinking into the seat, I revel in every biting chestful of the mountain air- every inch of chilled skin, every raised hair on my scalp and arms. The cold chases out every other thought in my head until it is quiet, and blessedly still.

* * *

_"I'm sorry," Peeta says and scratches the front of his head under his cap. "I know he was your friend- I shouldn't have said that."_

_"It's ok," I say, and swallow. Outside his truck, the sun is just setting and it casts a ochre glaze over the top of the lake. It ripples darkly, and my eyes can't seem to catch when the shift happens. Gold one moment, black the next. I am trying to figure out what it is that stung me so much about what he said and come up empty._

_"It's just, from everything I've heard, he sounds like a real piece of work."_

_I nod and fidget with the tape deck. Next song. This one feels like tired old cardboard. I've worn it thin, much like every song on this album. But it's one of my favorites, and tonight's a night for old favorites._

_Peeta sighs._

_"Are you mad?"_

_"No."_

_And I'm not. Peeta doesn't know that Gale wasn't just my friend. He doesn't know who Gale really was, because if he did, he wouldn't have called him an asshole. For everything, Gale always had a lot of friends. People liked him. Trusted him implicitly. And to be fair, he was an easy guy to trust. He was always there for you. Always._

_Peeta might have even liked him. Maybe they'd have been friends._

_My finger smashes the eject button._

_There's the problem. Me. I haven't said anything that wasn't true to Peeta about Gale. But I never told Peeta his name, or that we dated for years. I just said that we were friends, which, after all, was the truth too. But now- because it's me talking- Peeta thinks the worst of him. What kind of stories is Gale telling about me?_

_I dive to retrieve the box of tapes and feel my pulse throb in my neck._

_"He wasn't all bad," I mumble with my head between my knees and my arm twisting underneath the seat._

_"He just-"_

_I stop. I have no idea what I was going to say._

_Instead of finishing my thought, I jam the next tape in and start scanning through the intro. Somehow the idea of Peeta and Gale together isn't meshing well in my head. My stomach twists violently and suddenly I am breathing hard and wiping my hands on my pants, unable to understand anything except that I have made a huge mistake telling Peeta about Gale in the first place._

_Bright or dark, Gale was Gale. I know I was never capable of loving him the way he loved me. And I know never deserved it either._

_And that's when I look over at Peeta and the look on his face- like something just hit him in the gut- tells me what he's thinking._

_That I was in love with Gale, and maybe still am._

_"All this time," he starts, then shakes his head and looks away. My heart stops as I watch him swallow the rest of his sentence._

_"It isn't like that," I say quickly. "I never-"_

_"Then what is it like, Katniss?"_

_I hate the way his voice sounds. Resigned. Tired. As if he halfway expected this. But I don't know how to tell him that even though whatever it was I felt for Gale wasn't anywhere near love, I lived for the high of coming close to it. How do I explain the endless, aching emptiness that swallowed me when my eyes opened in that hospital? Or how it only ever went away when Gale gave me a reason to forget it? If there are words in the English language for this, I don't know them, so I mumble a squalid half-truth I know Peeta doesn't deserve._

_"He was my best friend. And then I-"_

_I leave it hanging like there's more to come, even though I know there's not. I think I was hoping I would say something else that would clear it up- for both of us- but all the words die in my throat. He drives me home in silence. I want to say sorry, but I don't know what I'm apologizing for. It sneaks out of my mouth anyway once we're at my cabin, and I scramble out of his truck before he can tell me that he never wants to see me again._

_I spend the night pacing, unable to sleep until the wee hours of morning when I collapse on my bed in a sore lump, wishing my heart would stop beating so loudly._

_It shouldn't matter. Peeta would be better off if I just stayed away from him. But the longer I don't hear from him, the worse my head spins, until finally I can't take it and force myself out of the house and into the car. My hands drive me to the Goodwill even though I don't need anything there, but because I have to do something today, I wander inside._

_And that's how I stumble on the find of a century, sitting right in front of the jumble of cassettes on the bottom rack of the music section. It's this band Peeta loves. They had one hit that every college indie station played and then they faded into total mediocrity. And right there in front of me is the cassette edition of the only decent album they ever made. Mint condition. Still in plastic. I chew on my lip as I snatch it off the shelf and turn it over in my hands. It'd be a waste of money to buy it. First of all, it's a garbage band. But more importantly, there's no reason to believe Peeta will ever want to see me again and I'll be stuck with a tape I won't want to listen to and couldn't bare to even look at._

_I buy it anyway._

_By the time I get home, plans to violently abandon my phone somewhere wet and deep are brewing in my head, and I have every intention on following through with them. Especially now that I have this stupid tape, which I'm probably just going to have to throw away anyway. As I stomp up the stairs to my cabin I am so busy fantasizing that I don't realize there is something on my top step until I crush it under my boot._

_My stomach twists as I look down._

_Wildflowers._

_I sit down beside the bruised stems and extricate a slip of paper with familiar cramped writing._

_'Tonight?'_

_I turn it over, but that's all it says. The flowers themselves are mostly fine. The stems are a different story though- they're totally flattened- and even though I rummage through my cabin for an appropriately short mug to put them in, I come up empty handed. I'm about to give up and stick them in a bowl when I remember something my mother did for me once. My cheeks burn as my hands fumble with the stems, but I ignore that as I lay the flowers out on the table._

_Hours later, I am wearing a woven wreath of wildflowers as Peeta's truck pulls up. His eyes catch on it as I climb in, and he looks away quickly when I catch him staring. He smiles at the dashboard and rubs the back of his neck._

_"Let's go somewhere new," I say, and shove the tape at him._

* * *

When I pull up in front of Peeta's house, two men are waiting for me on the curb- Peeta, his face tight and pale, and a cop who looks familiar enough to make my pulse race. I sigh heavily through my nose and resist the urge to slam my forehead into the steering wheel. As I slow to a stop, the cop stands and walks into the center of the road, speaking into a radio attached to his shoulder. Where do I know him from? Was he the one who arrested me? It would be just my fucking luck.

The cop is at Rue's door before I even open mine, scooping her out and carrying her hurriedly inside without a single word to me. This, of course, is horrible because it leaves me alone with the very person who both Rue and I hurt the worst tonight.

Peeta.

And this time, even though I know why I have to apologize, the words don't come. Not because I don't know what to say, but because I don't know where to start. So I stare at Peeta's flushed face and flared nostrils guiltily, my mouth snapping open and shut like the stupidest fish of all time.

"Eight hours, Katniss?! Where were you? Do you have any idea how-"

He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair as he looks toward the house.

"I'm sorry," I blurt out. "It was wrong to not call you. To leave you waiting like that."

Peeta swallows.

My eyes find my shoes and I shove my hands in the pockets of my dress, which suddenly feels more like a stupid costume.

"They found that missing girl tonight. Madge Undersee. The one who's been gone since December."

My neck cracks as my head jerks up.

"Right after the two of you disappeared to god knows where."

"Where was she?"

Peeta's eyes get hard again.

"They found her in the trunk of her own car."

The ground tilts ominously. I lift my hand to my mouth and close my eyes.

_Breathe in. Breathe out._

"We had cops crawling all over town and we still couldn't find you. You could have called, sent one fucking text- anything."

I want to pitch myself into the familiar cradle of Peeta's arms, but I think he'd catch my neck between both hands. And I wouldn't blame him in the least. As a familiar burning pressure builds behind my eyelids, something floats back to the surface of my mind. Without understanding how or why I could possibly know such a thing, I am certain someone hurt Peeta. Someone gave him up and never looked back. He has been hurt like I have, but unlike me, other people were there to catch him before he fell through the cracks, and last night, one of those people went missing.

What would I do if someone took him away from me?

It's too horrible to consider.

"She was going to Marvel," I say.

"Are you kidding me?," he says in disbelief as his arms fall away from his chest and he drops his face into his hands. "Godammit."

"I saw her sneaking out during cake."

"And you knew where she was going? How?"

"How the fuck do you think?"

There. I've really done it now. Peeta pales, and silence falls between us like a guillotine. Why am I always so unfair? None of this is Peeta's fault. It was his birthday for fuck's sake. He breathes in deep through his nose and rubs his face in his hands.

"Tell me what happened."

I ignore the possibility that he is asking about Gale and steam forward with the night's tale- everything from talking to Rue on the porch, to tailing her until she finally gave up. I leave out our conversation on the side of the road. I've already said way too much as far as that is concerned.

"And your car?" he asks.

I gesture vaguely at Rue's car behind me.

"Had to leave it. I need to get it towed to a shop."

Peeta sighs and checks his watch.

"It's still way too early."

I shrug.

"I'll walk back and wait."

He rolls his eyes.

"You can't be serious. Come inside. I'll drive you down later."

I shuffle my feet awkwardly. Inside is the last place I want to be. In the end though, Peeta talks me into it. I trail after him into the kitchen, where the cop is sitting scribbling something down at the table. I pause for a split second in the doorway, but he looks up and it's too late. His eyes catch on my face for a moment too long, and now I know that he has realized he's seen me before too.

And then Peeta all out abandons me with the excuse of needing to talk to his mother, and he uses my name.

The cop's eyes widen. Peeta walks out.

"Katniss Everdeen," he says as he stands. "I'm Detective Thresh Abernathy-Delacroix. We've been looking for you."

* * *

_The door slams hard enough that the walls rattle. Gale's home._

_I should be used to this. It shouldn't scare me this much, but I still flinch anyway. He bursts into our shared room, his face so dark I scramble immediately out of bed. In his hand is a folded sheet of paper, and I know it's the moment he's been dreading._

_"Posy?" I whisper._

_Gale twists his hands in hair, the letter fluttering helplessly to the ground. Not even a moment later, his fist is flying toward the wall next to him over and over again, silently working his knuckles to a bloody pulp. Each time his hand crashes into the plaster I twitch, silently grateful that his full attention is somewhere else before my reaction makes him angrier._

_As soon as it starts it's over. He hunches forward, pressing his fists into his face, collapsing under the weight of his own grief. I throw myself forward to catch him, and he holds onto me like I am the last thing he has in the world. I stroke his hair and try to soothe him while he sobs into my neck, but I know there's nothing in the world that could possibly fix what's happened._

_His father put his youngest sister up for adoption._

_We sink onto the bed, and in the tangle of limbs, my lips somehow find his. He goes still against me, his face tight with pain. Do you feel it too, Gale? That we've shared too many kisses like this- desperate, pained ones that numb more than they fix? There is never anything but bitter misery on our breath. That's what I feel now- the same numb heaviness that has driven me back into Gale's arms as many times as I've tried to leave. He flips me under him, his arms planted on either side of my head and he smudges a wet trail down my throat, my chest, my stomach, my skin pebbling weakly in his wake._

_It's over fast._

_Despite Gale's ragged breaths and soft grunts, I hardly even think it counts as sex. It more like I've fulfilled a need, served a purpose. Like an appliance. Afterward he clings to me for a long time, his arms so tight I have trouble filling my lungs completely._

_"You have to do it," he says finally. My stomach tightens._

_"Gale. No. We talked about this."_

_He sits up suddenly, pushing me away from him._

_"Think about it. All that money. Think about what we could do."_

_"They'll never let you adopt her. Not when we live here. This is no place for a kid."_

_"But with the money-"_

_"We need co-signers for a new lease. And we need real jobs, which we can't get without going to school, which we can't do because we can't afford to quit our shit jobs in the first place. It's not enough money for any of that and you know it."_

_"Yeah? Maybe not. But it's a damn good start."_

_"The answer is no."_

_His eyes turn cold._

_"What is the big deal? All you have to do is stand up in that courtroom, tell them what happened to your family and you'll walk out with a cool ten grand. I don't get fucking get it."_

_"Because I said no!"_

_Gale rolls off our mattress, pulls a shirt over his head and tugs on his boots and jacket. As he heads for the door, and I sit up hurriedly and clutch the damp sheet around my chest, tucking the mess that used to be my braid behind my ear._

_"Where are you going?" I say._

_He tugs open the door and spares me a final seething glance._

_"You're a fucking coward."_

_And then he's gone._

* * *

Detective Abernathy-Delacroix crosses his arms.

"A woman named Sae Spoonriver filed a missing person report eight months ago. Said one day you just stopped showing up for work. None of your friends knew where you went."

I swallow. Greasy Sae. My boss from the diner. That sweet, wonderful, toothless woman was the only person in the world who realized I was gone, and the only person who cared enough to try to find out what had happened to me. In my mind's eye, I see her calling Finnick, driving slowly down the trash-strewn street where I used to live. I imagine her talking to a motley assortment of ex-roommates in patched, studded jackets who are camped out with forties on the front stoop.

"We interviewed your boyfriend," he says, and my heart thuds heavily."He said he knew nothing about where you might go. Seemed to think you left him."

For a treacherously long time, I don't know what to say. Then-

"Please. If you're going to arrest me, just do it."

His face tightens, and he looks down.

"It's my job to report an incident like this," he says carefully. "It's a waste of police energy and taxpayer's money. Disappearing like that is fraud."

He clears his throat.

"Plain and simple, I don't trust you, Ms. Everdeen. You lied to my brother. You lied to your boss. You lied to me... But that was my baby sister you brought home."

Rue's brother. I suddenly understand that he looks familiar not only because he looks just like Rue and Peeta's mom, but also because he was one of the cops who came to my door all those months ago looking for me. He must not have recognized me then, but he does now. I wonder if my face was close to joining Madge's on bar alleyway walls and coffee shop bulletin boards.

"I never saw you. We never spoke. This never happened."

Then Thresh leans forward, his face a stony mask.

"But after this, I don't owe you."

I swallow and cross my arms over my chest tightly.

"Thank you," I say.

Thresh pushes his chair back and fits his hat over his head.

"While you were out with her… My mom will want to know. What did Rue say to you?" he asks gruffly.

"It was Marvel."

He stares at me for another minute, measuring me carefully. I feel like a bug he's pinned under a bright lamp, all ready for a dissection I never agreed to. Something on his face tells me he knows what Gale did. His clenched jaw, his piercing eyes- It's possible he knows everything about me- even the things my record doesn't show.

"Legally, I don't ever have to tell your ex where you are. That's your business. And I'd never-" He stops, his brow furrowing and his jaw clenching. "Even if I had to tell him, I wouldn't."

He looks back at me, appraising me once again, then steps through the front door and into the rising sun. The screen door snaps shut behind him.

By the time Peeta comes back, I am all alone in the kitchen. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair as his eyes flicker to the front window overlooking the driveway. When he looks back at me, those eyes are softer.

"Katniss. I don't think I thanked you."

"I didn't do anything."

Peeta shakes his head.

"My dad said you'd say that."

"Well it's true."

I watch his adam's apple bob and his eyes catch on the twist of arms wrapped around my chest.

"Just once, I wish I knew what was going through your head."

He smiles sadly.

"You know what I realized? I know next to nothing about you. I don't even know your last name, or where you're from. I don't know what your favorite subject in school was, or if you have any brothers or sisters. All I know is that you would fight someone twice your size to protect someone else, but you run scared at the slightest chance of letting someone in."

"Is any of that really so important?" I say weakly.

Peeta laughs.

"That's the thing about friends, Katniss. They tell each other stuff."

"What if I don't want to be your friend?"

A heavy silence falls between us, and I could swear that my heartbeat is echoing off the polished concrete and tile. Since the moment I met Peeta I have made myself sick with wanting and waiting and dreading. Friends. I hate that word. It's so obvious now that Peeta and I never stood a chance at being friends. Not even if I wasn't so messed up. Not even if Peeta wasn't so good. Not even if we lived in another place, another time, another world.

We were doomed from the start.

I drop my arms and close the distance between us, catching his jaw and cradling it in hands I hope aren't trembling enough that Peeta will notice. Why have I never noticed the dusting of freckles on his nose? Or his eyes- which I thought were so incredibly blue, but are actually ringed with gold?

He tastes like coffee- warm and sweet and strong.

This isn't the first time we've kissed. Not by far. But it is the first time I have abandoned all hope of never wanting more. My legs wobble like a baby deer. I press them together and pretend I don't know what is happening as a familiar fluttering warmth awakens in my chest- a tender, urgent thing that whimpers in shock when one of Peeta's hands finds the small of my back and the other the base of my head, steadying me on my tiptoes as I lean up and into him.

Surely, friends don't kiss like this.

* * *

It isn't until later- after Peeta convinces me to eat and take nap- that we call up the tow-truck and he drives me out to my car. I am still sleepy in the golden light of the afternoon, and sleepier still for how much warmer it is than last night. I rest heavily against the back of the seat in Peeta's truck and watch the fiery leaves pass.

I've never been here for autumn. Peeta had told me over and over how beautiful it was, but I don't think I was truly prepared. Bright reds and coppery browns spill across the landscape like overturned jars of paint, dotted by splatters of yellow aspen and a few stubbornly green firs.

"I told you," Peeta says smugly.

I roll my eyes at him, but he was right.

"It's incredible," I say breathlessly.

He drops me off at my car, but not before he makes me promise to text him when I get home- a promise I more than intend to keep after last night. I shoot him one as he's pulling away just to prove it.

"Come over tonight. Bring Blondie."

I am smiling stupidly as the tow truck pulls up, but quickly shove my phone in my pocket. The driver is the same man who fixed my car for free not too long ago, and he isn't shocked to see me on the side of the road now. He shakes his head and whistles as he attaches the hook under my front bumper.

"Not doing too well, is she?" he says. "That's ok. We'll fix her up. Good as new."

While he works, he offers to let me sit in the cab of the air conditioned truck, which I gratefully accept as I wipe a trickle of sweat from my cheek. Inside the truck, I dose again as he works, so I miss it when he climbs inside besides me. I wake up to a sharp, chemical smell and my head bumping against the seat.

"Oh. Sorry. I didn't know you were done," I say.

"Not a problem at all, Miss," he responds. I catch another whiff of the chemical smell, and for a moment, I struggle to place what it is. Something bumps my leg on the floor and I see an open canvas tool bag with duct tape and a few tools, and my eyes trail over to my door.

There's a hole where the handle should be.

I look quickly back to the driver, and all at once it comes together.

I have been so stupid. So incredibly, unforgivably stupid. His hair. Its straw colored- a blonde so flat it looks-

Wrong.

The ground beneath my feet vanishes. I see it all as if a movie is playing in my head: A tow-truck creeping around in the absolute darkness of a mountain-top night. Madge Undersee's beautiful, shocked face. Boxes of hair bleach, duct tape and a gallon of Clorox in a red shopping basket. A car sunk off the marshy shoulder of a less-traveled road. Forgotten. Abandoned. Disposable.

Madge Undersee was never missing. Someone made her disappear.

And I'm next.


	8. Flashing Lights

**Home is in Your Skin**

"Real or not real, I am on fire."

* * *

**viii.**

There is only one way I will make it out of this alive.

I must pretend I am not sitting next to a murderer.

There are a hundred different ways he could kill me before I could ever hope to escape, and each runs through my head in a flash. Suffocation, a blunt object, a blow to my temple with his fist, a well placed knife... His oversized jumpsuit hangs off his slender frame, but I can tell he has a wiry sort of strength, and in close quarters like this, I still stand no chance of fighting him off. And who knows what he has stashed away in this truck? It's an old one- from the sixties or seventies- and there are plenty of places where torn vinyl could be turned into pockets for weapons. All he needed was a heavy tool- maybe something like one of the wrenches sitting in the bag by my feet- and I'd be a goner.

So I do what every muscle in my body is screaming against. I sit perfectly still with my heart galloping in my throat as Estes Park proper passes just beyond the glass of my window.

Thin plumes of smoke rise above a group of people smoking in front of the diner. The neon sign above them flickers to life in the fading light. A woman in a pink maid's uniform and child hold hands as they walk into the laundromat. Just hours ago, their world was mine. Now I am different. I know a monster walks among them, hiding in human skin.

The truck rumbles to a stop in front of the red neon welcome sign on the door of the auto repair shop. A ring of keys attached to the one in the ignition swings pendulously, and I wonder where they all came from. Some of them are old and rusted, so degraded I can't imagine they'd have been of any use even five years ago. In the muted red light, the one at the very end flashes bright and pale.

It's new.

My stomach lurches in horror.

"Hang on," the mechanic says. "I'll walk around and get your door. It sticks."

The moment his door closes I slide across the seats and reach for the window crank, winding it furiously. It doesn't budge at first, then drops with each turn of my arm. I don't need to wind it far and the moment I'm sure I can, I wriggle through it and climb onto of the roof. The metal is hot enough to burn my hands, but I flatten myself against it anyway, careful to stay away from the edge. From my limited vantage point, I watch the mechanic as he walks to my door. A flash of metal shines in my eyes from his hands.

The door creaks open, and I wait with baited breath as he swears loudly and leans his head into the cab. With all the strength I can muster, I swing one of my legs down and crack the tip of my boot on his skull. He falls halfway into the cab, unmoving, but I'm not taking any chances. I leap onto the hood of the truck and it bounces on its groaning suspension. Pain shoots up my legs from my ankles and I overbalance and tumble to the ground on my side. My cheek and thigh sting as I stagger to my feet, but the real problem is my left ankle. Something's wrong with it- something more than just me landing on it funny. A deep, horrible pain shoots up my leg as I move it.

I don't have fucking time for this. Though the mechanic isn't moving, my window of freedom won't last nearly long enough. I need to move. Beyond the blood pumping in my ears I can hear the distant hum of speeding cars. The highway isn't too far from here- I've walked it before. If I can get past the gates, I might stand a chance of getting there. I grit my teeth and take off through collection of rusted cars and tarp covered junk piles in the parking lot, weaving my way toward the entrance.

I almost make it, too.

But five feet from the gate there's a metallic click and a row of rusted spikes grow out of the ground suddenly. And one shoots right through the top of my foot. Earth and trees and sky bleed together in a dark, incomprehensible mash. My breathing echoes impossibly loud in my head. There is nothing holding me upright while the world rearranges itself, so I let the ground tilt up behind me. The scream that rents the night air is definitely mine, but I never feel it leaving me. All I'm aware of is the explosion of pain in my foot as it pulls backward and off the spike.

Rocks and earth surge up to pillow my cheek in a cloud of sand and dust. A motionless hand lands in front of my face, then falls away as something tugs on my scalp. The ground is moving again. I am sliding backwards through the parking lot, past the cars and into blackness.

It is July 4th, 1998.

The sky above the roof where I lie on my father's quilt is a field of color and light, and Prim- a warm, softly snoring lump at my side- is missing it all. Mom and Dad sit beside us on chairs they dragged up from the kitchen, Mom's head on Dad's shoulder, their fingers loosely linked. In two years, Mom will slip on on an icy sidewalk. Her back and head will strike the ground, and for a very long time, she will lie there, staring blankly up into a gently snowing sky. Prim will start to cry immediately, but I will pull at mom's shoulder, screaming at her to wake up. But Mom won't hear me. She's in shock, and for the longest three minutes of my life, she will lie there motionlessly.

She is hurt. Very hurt. But we won't know it until a week later, when the doctor puts a bottle of pills in her hand with a name that- to me- seems like a jumble of sounds and letters- oxycontin- but would later become the reason Mom loses her job.

A few years after this, the economy will crash, and Dad will lose his job too.

But this is before all that. Before Building 12. Before I ever hear the words 'section 8'.

Tonight, I am just an 8-year old transfixed by the light blooming in the sky.

As I fight a yawn I know that soon I will no longer be able to hold my eyes open. I'm not ready for it to be over. Not yet. Tomorrow, the sky will go back to the same black-blue it always is. Tomorrow there will be no brightly colored decorations. No one laughing in their yards, no one grilling at the park. Tomorrow, summer will be almost half-over, and I will be hurtling towards the fourth grade. Ready or not.

With bursting light in my drooping eyes, I wonder for the first time what dying will be like.

Quiet? Like falling asleep?

Or terrifying, like skidding on the ground after flying off a swing?

What will be the last thing I think about? The last person I see? The last thing that I say?

Will I be alone?

I turn my head to look at my sleeping sister, her soft breaths puffing against my shoulder. Prim still has blue frosting on her lips, a remnant of the cupcakes Mom got at the Safeway. The small cakes were dry but deliciously saccharine, and made all the sweeter by the crayola-blue frosting that topped them in small twists.

I put my hand on her shoulder and shake.

"Prim. Prim."

She doesn't move.

"Katniss, leave your sister alone," Mom says. "She's tired."

"She's missing the fireworks," I say.

"Honey, she's five. Let her sleep."

I roll onto my back as a volley of golden trails burst into white and blue. My eyes slide shut. I promise myself I will open them in a minute.

Of course, that's never how it works.

The next thing I am aware of is a pair of arms around me and the squeal of the roof door as it opens. Then, a light bouncing as I am carried down a flight of stairs. My chest tightens. How long have I been asleep? How much did I miss?

It's over now, of course.

I think I might cry, but before that can happen a quiet, sober feeling takes root inside me. I understand for the first time that life goes on, whether or not we are there to witness it. One day, I will die. That will be the end. The world will still spin. The sun will still rise. I just won't be there to see it anymore. It's not a bad feeling. It's not good either, but it comforts me slightly to think that Prim will be there when I go, because she is three years younger and will therefor live three years longer.

I curl into my father's chest, my fingers clutching his shirt tightly.

"Can I have a cupcake for breakfast?" I murmur as he sets me in my bed.

He laughs quietly and pulls the covers over my shoulders. So warm. I tuck my legs in and squirm down until the covers come up to my ears. Over the rustling of the sheets I hear him say-

"Goodnight, Katniss."

The light turns out.

I come back to the world in an explosion of white hot pain and garbled screaming.

I am draped forward in a chair with my hands in my lap, bound with a thick layer of masking tape so tight my fingers are fat and pale. Underneath them are gaping rips in my tights where I fell off the hood of the truck, and the skin beneath is raw, bleeding and peppered with grit. Beyond my knees, a trailing smear of dark glittering blood ends in a pool under my left foot. My head spins and the blood disappears as my eyes slide shut again. I try to swallow, but some type of heavy cloth has been stuffed in my mouth. With a deep breath through my nose the room steadies somewhat, but a lungful of the sharp, bitter scent that soaks the air does nothing to alleviate my nausea.

"YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH-"

I wince and a thought floats to the surface of the murky slew in my head. It's not one scent in my nose but several all mixed together. Bleach. Gasoline. Burnt rubber. More bleach. So much bleach. I open my eyes and lift my pounding head. There's a sound I don't recognize. A heavy and hollow colliding with flesh. A pitiful whimper echoes in the suddenly otherwise quiet space- the kind of sound a dog makes when it's kicked.

It jumpstarts the most primal part of my brain, and everything snaps back into focus. I'm in some back part of the garage- a car is vaulted on a metal stilt to expose its underbelly, and the far wall is lined with time-worn tools and fluttering slips of paper. In the right corner of the room is a large metal desk covered in papers and pieces of wood. A single desk lamp buzzes and flickers as something hits the desk and a deep, meta llic sound echoes in the sparse room. I see a figure underneath the desk, and then a leg kicks out, finds purchase on the floor and pushes back. It's the mechanic. I can just barely see him as he cowers, his hands holding his head as he pushes himself closer to the wall.

A shadow falls over him.

I t's a second man- one I'm sure I've never seen before. He's slender too, and short, stooped only further by age. What remains of his hair is a shock of white against his dark-speckled scalp, but nothing about him is fragile from his wide legged stance to his hunched back, which is still as broad as a barrel. He raises a bulging forearm and something long and fluid snaps in the air over his head.

A belt.

The mechanic is screaming before it's even begun descending through the air, so I never see what happens when it hits him. I am long gone by then, having launched myself sideways out of the chair and stumbling on my throbbing foot past the wall lined with slips of paper and toward the source of their fluttering- an open door in the opposite corner of the room. I throw myself inside the dark space and slam the door shut, struggling with my fat, numb fingers to lock it and brace my shoulder against the flimsy wood. I can only hope it's stronger than it looks, but the odds haven't been in my favor for so long that I am already counting down the moments until it breaks. There's a roar- "GET THAT BITCH-" - and then my skull is rattling against the wood as the door shutters violently. With my hands still taped together and semi-useless, I scan the walls desperately for a light switch and come up with nothing.

"OPEN THE DOOR!"

The door groans loudly as something huge slams against it and the whole wall shudders. My foot, the one that's still leaking blood, slips and I land hard on a cold tile floor. I struggle to stand myself up again, but as I do, something brushes the top of my head. I jerk back, then reach out for it as the door groans again. It's some sort of string. I yank and the tiny room is flooded with light, and that's when I realize why the scent of bleach burns stronger here than anywhere else. I'm in a small, dingy bathroom, and lining the sink are several bowls of drugstore hair bleach, all mixed and ready to go.

In the mirror above my sink, I catch sight of my reflection and reel, yanking the gag out of my mouth and ripping away the tape binding my hands with my teeth. How had I not noticed before? My hair is loose, hanging in a tangled curtain around my shoulders, which could only mean-

Someone took my braid out.

Something like a clap of thunder echoes in the bathroom and I scream as I drop instinctually to the floor. I hear a click. Two small, metallic pings. Then a louder click.

"This door gon' open, little girl! One way or the other, I'm coming in there!"

More thunder. I drop to the floor and throw my hands over my ears, breathing rapidly as holes appear in the wood, and somewhere overhead, glass shatters and a rush of cool air blows into the bathroom. My stomach swoops as I look behind me at a broken window on the other side of the shower curtain that blocks off the tub. If only I could get to it without risking getting shot- I could be out of here- I'm so fast, there's no way they could catch me if I ran this time. I know better than to try the front gate. This whole place has to be riddled with traps. But if I scale the fence in the back, then run around to the highway…

A bullet ricochets off the tile and lands with a heavy plink in the toilet bowl behind me, and that's when something like a plan takes root in my mind. I've never done anything like it before… But I know the general idea behind why it works… And if it works-

I shake my head to clear it, reach up to sweep a hand across the sink top. Bowls of bleach fall and splatter on the floor, as does a pair of gloves, a roll of tinfoil and five boxes. I grab the boxes first and rip them open, removing the plastic squeeze bottles and shoving hastily rolled balls of tinfoil inside. More shots ring out in the bathroom as I shove the gloves on my shaking hands and I flinch back. The only thing that's kept me safe so far is that door, but it won't hold much longer. I grind my teeth down.

Focus.

I rip off the bottom of my dress, throw it in the sink and turn the faucet on as I open the cabinet underneath it and, right up front and center, see the bright blue bottle that means my freedom.

Drano .

What happens next I remember in disconnected snapshots.

On the floor of the bathroom, there is a line of hair bleach bottles filled with drano and aluminum foil. One is set directly in front of the door. A water darkened scrap of red fabric is tied around my face. My fingers on the cheap gold lock of the doorknob. A dark figure in the doorway seen through a cloudy shower curtain as the door swings open.

In the next instant, there is deafening blast and a spray of foam splatters against the curtain and the bathroom echoes with screams. I am pulling myself through the window during the second blast, only distantly aware of the broken of glass that slices my palms open.

They bleed freely as I fly into the black-blue night, my breath and pulse roaring in my head. The fence is nearly invisible in the darkness, and surrounded by trees, topped by a spiral of razorwire. I thread my slippery, bloody fingers into the chainlinks and climb, catching the fabric of my dress and tights on the razorwire. It rips as I throw myself over it and land in a crumpled heap on the other side. For a long time, I am too winded to move. It's like I'm underwater, breathless and struggling as a dull, ringing silence closes me off from the rest of the world. All I hear are the garbled echoes of screaming, the roar of an engine, and what some primal part of me registers as another gunshot.

Hands digging into the soft dirt, I launch myself away from the fence and stumble on my injured foot through the trees, ignoring the ribbons of pain that lace up my legs. A beam of light cuts through the darkness then separates into two, reaching over the path in front of me and then disappears. I break for the place it came from and run headlong into the road, and a storm of flashing lights.

Blue and white and red dance in my eyes as I whip around, momentarily blinded by the chaos of color and sound. Police sirens, screaming, the roar of engines- I spin again, but someone grabs me and starts to drag me toward a silhouetted wall of cars and men. I am kicking and writhing, scratching anything I can sink my nails into, when they pick me up and carry me through the ranks of shadowy forms and away from the lights, and that's when the world erupts in a roar of thunder and smoke.

"Please state your name for the record."

"Katniss. Katniss Everdeen."

"How old are you, Katniss?"

"Thirteen."

"Do you know what year it is?"

"2003."

"And who is the president Katniss?"

"Um. John Kerry."

"Good. Now. Can you confirm that you are a patient here at the Boulder Community Health Hospital?"

"Yeah. Yes."

"And what is the reason for your hospitalization?"

"I..."

"Take your time, Katniss. It's ok."

"I..."

"Can you confirm that you are here as the result of a fire at the Panem Circle Community Housing Project?"

"No… no-"

"Katniss?"

"No. No- No. No-"

"Shut it off- she's obviously useles-"

"Seneca! That's not helping."

"Katniss, it's ok. Just tell the truth-"

"Look at her, Annalise. She's shaking. She can't testify. She'll crumple up there. This is a waste of time."

"Katniss, just a yes or no, did you or did you not sustain grievous burns as a result of the fire at the-"

"No- no-"

"This interview is over."

"Just another minute, Seneca, we can-"

"I SAID SHUT IT OFF."


End file.
